How does culturally sustainable development contribute to social wellbeing?
Wellbeing is much more than just having enough food or healthcare or access to education. It is a much broader kind of concept. It has to take into account individual or personal feelings. Of course, if you think of the hierarchy of needs, people who don’t have access to good water or healthcare or food wouldn’t be thinking about other things very much but as soon as you get past that, then suddenly cultural development becomes really important. You know, how you are feeling depends on your ideas about freedom and about selfexpression, and your identity. These are important at every layer of society when you get just past your basic needs being satisfied. For me, wellbeing is just automatically connected with culture, because the way that somebody from South Africa defines wellbeing (even within different groups in South Africa) might be totally different from how someone in Europe or the U.S. or Australia defines wellbeing. So what’s important is really quite separate. That’s why you also need to take into account the cultural context.
How can cultural institutions contribute to sustainable development?
Cultural industries as a sector, as an understanding, that is quite a new thing. They’ve always been there, of course, but they’ve never been seen as one connected sector. We’ve always looked at the movie industry or architects or advertising but as separate things and the problem is they’re still quite dispersed in terms of policies. In South Africa, for example, the Department of Trade and Industry provides all the film subsidies but the Department of Arts and Culture deals with all the museums and professional associations. I think understanding the sector as a coherent whole that has similar, not the same, but similar kinds of ideas and goals is a really big step in the right direction in terms of helping them to reach their potential and acknowledging their importance in society. We don’t have the data yet for South Africa, but there are indications and it’s been shown in many countries that the cultural and creative industries grow faster than the rest of the economy. They’re part of this new service sector, with creation and innovation being really important drivers of economic growth, so I think this is a big potential contributor to economic growth overall.
How does economics, in other words the way of thinking of economists, contribute to a better understanding of art and culture?
Well, you’re asking an economist, right? I think there’s a lot of resistance from artists themselves or practitioners, shall we say, to this idea that economics can have something important or useful to say about the cultural creative process. I think it’s because there is a misunderstanding that economics means money, so if you are an economist, you only care about money or finances or market prices and those kinds of things you can measure easily. But that’s not really true. Economics is about everything, it’s about the choices that you make in your everyday life, the choices that a government has to make: wellbeing as you’ve already mentioned, sustainable development, livelihoods… All of those things fit under economics. I think economics can have quite a lot to say to the arts and culture sector, particularly helping to express the kinds of values that they produce in a way that policymakers and funders will understand. A lot of the work that I do is to use economic theory to talk about different kinds of value associated with the cultural and creative industries and then say to artists: “Could this framework be useful for you to talk to the funders and the community that you work in and the government policymakers?” In a way, I think we can be a bridge between all the different groups in society for expressing and, in some cases, for measuring cultural value.
What topics might be of interest for young researchers starting their careers in the coming years?
In cultural economics? If it were me, let me answer it that way, I think I would be really interested in this idea of the cultural and creative industries as drivers of economic growth and development. Not just growth, but also development. And the big gap is not so much on the consumption side, what do the users do and buy and so on… but on the production side. How does this happen? How do the cultural and creative industries actually work? There’s a lot of case study, anecdotal evidence out there about the precariats, people who are highly educated in, say, the film sector, one of the most studied sectors where you have a short-term jobs and you move from one contract to the other. But I think there are lots of things we don’t know about: what’s happening in other sectors, for example, how does the craft sector work? These seem to be small stable businesses that exist over time. How does the informal sector work? I think this is an opportunity where developing countries can have an advantage, because, for us, the norm is the informal sector.