Throughout the CreaTures project, we have spoken with policy makers and funders and others that support creative practice. We have focused on variations of the question: how can policy, funding, and other types of support unlock the power of creative practices for better futures?
We have had these conversations in different contexts and at different levels. We have spoken locally with policy makers and funders in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Finland. We have also had exciting dialogues and workshops based not on location but on theme: around ecology and the more-than-human, and around games and play.
These dialogues have been very enlightening –it is clear that there is an increasing interest among among our interviewees in the power of creative practices as a pathway for societal change. But there are also some real challenges.
Firstly, there is a question of how to meaningfully link creative practice and societal change. On the one hand, creative practices run the risk of being instrumentalized and flattened by policy for social change purposes, and in the process, what is unique and powerful about them might be lost while putting more pressure on already precarious creatives.On the other hand, there is a real need to make the value of creative practices for change legible and communicable, somehow, to unlock resources and institutional support.
Secondly, the contexts for creative practices present real complexity as well. And it’s not simply a matter of getting inert societal systems to shift. As the pandemic has clearly demonstrated, the world is changing all the time. Existing power structures do not remain in place just because they are simply ‘there’. Instead, lots of creativity and effort goes into helping the people and systems that are currently in charge stay on top in a changing world. Our team member Richard Lane has referred to this type of non-transformative creative work as ‘shadow CreaTures’. In other words, creative practices are trying to stimulate change in a world that is constantly changing, just not toward more sustainable and eco-social futures.
The CreaTures project has been wrestling with these challenges. We have created two resources for policy and funding as a response:
- a reflective evaluation approach using 9 dimensions to connect creative practices to eco-social change;
- higher level insights about what needs to change in the policy and funding contexts of creative practice.
Our interviews with policy makers, funders and others made it clear that many in such positions have a deep sense that creative practices might be a powerful pathway to stimulate societal change.But this sense is often at least partly intuitive and anecdotal, while existing ways of tracking impact such as visitor numbers or simple diversity measures fail to capture the richness of the practice. CreaTures has combined dialogues from practice with a deep dive in many relevant fields of literature to build a robust set of 9 dimensions that can be used to describe how creative practice matters for societal change; and to reflect on and evaluate real life work in this regard.
The dimensions are organized along three types of change: changing meanings (embodying, learning, imagining); changing connections (caring, organizing, inspiring), and changing power (co-creating, empowering, subverting). These 9 CreaTures dimensions can be used for evaluative purposes, but also to design funding calls and to frame policies and strategies. For more on the 9 dimensions, see here. We have applied these 9 dimensions across all 20 CreaTures projects as well, and found that creative practices that combine learning and imagination rooted in embodied experience with methods and approaches that can be adapted, hacked, mutated and passed on have significant potential to stimulate transformative societal change.
Secondly, a number of higher level insights have been drawn from our policy dialogues as well as literatures about cultural policy and sustainability transformations. These insights are meant to stimulate some different thinking around the supporting of creative practices that seek to create more sustainable futures. They are especially focused on the role of evaluation, agenda setting and impact thinking, which we understand to be a real leverage point for change. After all, the ways creative practices are evaluated determines what is being made, who gets to be involved, and soon. Here are our insights:
1. Transformative societal change does not fit within single projects.
Evaluations of creative practices are often focused on linear, short-term results, often limited to project-level reporting. This kind of evaluation does very little to help gain insights into the links between creative practices and societal transformations. Evaluations need to take a wider view, based on the understanding that societal transformations often happen because many groups, projects and organizations are trying to create change in very different ways.
2. Unexpected outcomes are valuable.
Societal transformations, whether we see them as good or bad from our particular perspectives, are unpredictable and often require truly novel ways of seeing and acting. Creative practices are very good at helping facilitate new perspectives and creating unpredictable results in the form of new initiatives, new connections between people, and more. Policy and funding should accommodate this unpredictability.
3. Evaluations are about power and meaning-making.
It is important to recognize that rather than being neutral, evaluations shaped by processes of dialogue, rhetoric, power and meaning-making involving many different people and organizations. Different people and organizations use ideas, evidence, and stories as rhetoric to support their positions, secure funding, frame policy action, and more.
4. Evaluation is always creative, and should be recognized as such.
When we set out what success and failure look like for creative and arts practices, we are essentially in a design mode. It’s important to realize this. We are in a way imagining the future we want, even if that future is still rather open. Being aware of the creative power inherent in evaluation and agenda setting is important to allow for new ways of supporting creative practice.
5. Creative practices can subvert existing societal processes.
Much about our current realities are fundamentally destructive and counter to a more sustainable future.Evaluations often focus on how to improve things, make new processes and actions work. But from the perspective of societal transformations, there should be a much stronger focus on how creative practices help subvert, disrup tand unmake damaging elements of societies.
6. Safety is needed for learning.
Organizations in the culture sector and more generally experience a profound lack of safety that does not allow them to investigate honestly whether projects and processes have succeeded or failed. Evaluation, then, becomes more about advocacy and defence than learning. Creating a safe environment that enables learning is crucial, especially in the context of societal transformations, which bring significant uncertainties and instabilities.
We’ve developed a brief capturing these insights, which can be found here. Do let us know if these insights from our dialogues and research literatures resonate with you, and if you find them useful!