Cultural Policy is Local

This edited collection calls for a greater understanding of ‘the local’ within the ways the arts, culture and creative practices are governed and promoted, regulated, resourced and valued. Cultural policy studies tends to marginalise the ‘local’, emphasising its value as a case study, rather than a topic of study in its own right. There is also privileging of the national (and international) as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted, and thus can be reformed. While this may make global policy transfer manageable for national policy agencies, there are contingent relationships between policy and ‘the local’ which inform practice, and which reflect diverse geographies with distinct identities. This volume interrogates our conceptualisations of ‘the local’ in cultural policy studies. The book is structured around three themes: disciplining the local, through examination of particular understandings of the key concepts from different academic fields of study; managing the local, through examination of policy approaches that engage with the idea of ‘the local’ in different ways; and practising the local, through case studies of how ‘local’ cultural policies are being enacted in places of differing scale and geography.