The following are my remarks at the Panel on Cultural Citizenship, as part of the first Cultural Summit of the Americas, held in Ottawa from May 9th to 11th.
— You can download my Powerpoint presentation here.
— For more information about the Summit’s first day, click here.
— Download post-event report, here.
Good morning.
I would like to begin by thanking the Algonquin nation for their hospitality and by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is their traditional and unceded territory.
I would also like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their invitation to participate in this Summit and my co-speakers and moderator for the opportunity to share this panel with you.
I want to begin summarizing the 3 main ideas behind my presentation:
FIRST: that today, the term “cultural citizenship” is closely associated with the creation and appreciation of the arts. While important, this conceptual bias gives shape to a specific and somewhat limiting model of cultural democracy.
SECOND: that while as a sector we do recognize the importance of participatory governance to advance cultural citizenship, we tend to neglect other aspects of participation, as well as the role transparency and accountability play on good governance. This has direct consequences on the quality of participation and its outcomes.
THIRD: that the multiple civic agendas promoted by cultural organizations across the region represent distinct embodiments of cultural citizenship — encarnaciones de ciudadanía cultural — and that these tangible forms have yet to be recognized, strengthened and included in cultural governance models. This is an opportunity we should not miss.
So, let’s go back to the FIRST IDEA: The current notion of cultural citizenship contains a great degree of conceptual ambiguity. For some it means the right to be different. For others, the process through which subjects create and are created by the nation and civil society.
If cultural citizenship has to do with “full participation in cultural life” we are left with the task of figuring out what “cultural life” entails and what “full participation” might look like.
We should at least however, recognize that historically we’ve given priority to a conception of cultural citizenship concerned primarily with access to the arts and culture.
This is a problem, in so far it tends to center the conversation on a celebration of the arts, while not paying enough attention to the modes of cultural governance that determine our capacity to create and appreciate cultural expressions.
This makes it harder to link cultural citizenship with other pressing social concerns such as justice, equality, diversity, access to public space, freedom of expression, memory and peace, for example — or to other sectors, like health, education environment, etc.
To be sure, this does not mean abandoning our concern with the arts, but expanding our current understanding of cultural citizenship and how it is enabled.
This leads us to the SECOND IDEA: that there is not enough depth to our current recognition of civic engagement as an enabler of cultural citizenship.
Participation tends to be poorly conceptualized, often limited to processes of consultation: not collaboration, not empowerment, nor co-creation. Key issues related to the philosophy of open government — including transparency and accountability — are often neglected.
This means that we are effectively constricting participation, reducing it to its most effective use as a tool for institutional validation, a gesture of openness, and not as a factor that determines the validity, legitimacy and sustainability of cultural policy. While Catherine Murray argued in 2005 that “the problem has been an under-theorization of the “cultural” in participatory democracy”, today we have an under-theorization of the “civic” in cultural democracy.
This brings us to the THIRD IDEA, which I am glad to say includes some GOOD news. Today there are thousands of cultural organizations working in very diverse territories across the region, activating and promoting various agendas for cultural policy transformation. These agendas constitute distinct embodiments of cultural citizenship, if we understand the concept as including engagement with cultural governance through civic participation. While these agendas and the issues they bring forth are often underestimated by governments, many of them have effectively advanced change at the local level, demonstrating that civil society has the capacity to inform and impact cultural governance.
In 2015, we mapped some of these experiences in a report called AbreCultura. It included several experiences across Latin America which can be understood as civic engagement processes that reaffirm cultural citizenship. Recognizing these and other civic experiences is important.
One of our first projects in 2009 was mapping hundreds of cultural organizations in Peru, aiming to make them more visible and able to work with each other. After a year, the database included close to a thousand entities, most of which the State knew very little about.
We knew this because we compared the few existing official databases on the subject. This meant that the State’s perception of the role of civil society in cultural promotion was quite askew and that its capacity to interact and collaborate with civil society was quite weak.
This first initiative — Culturaperu.org — taught us that it is important for civil society to construct its own map of the civic cultural sector — its own gaze, if you will — because this creates new possibilities to re-think our problems.
The information we gathered allowed us to visualize very specific patterns of clustering and centralization in our sector, which spoke to power imbalances that needed to be corrected.
To do so, in 2011 we partnered with other cultural organizations to create the first National Encounter of Culture, a national civic platform that fostered dialogue and debate on cultural policies.
The first four editions allowed us to showcase the ideas of hundreds of cultural managers and organizations. It also gave us the opportunity to engage the State, inviting authorities to participate.
While some public officials were eager to share, many seemed reluctant to participate in a space they did not control. The institutional silence we received from authorities, especially those in the highest ranks, revealed what seemed to be an unsurmountable distance. Addressing this historical gap — this rift — between State and Civil Society is crucial to enable cultural citizenship and promote cultural democracy.
Four years down the road, not much had changed. We felt that we were still in the same place as before. While we met every year to discuss our problems, we were unable to spark a collective movement to address the multiple problems we could easily identify.
That’s when we realized we needed to move beyond an event towards a process, one that could serve to build not only a collective horizon for change, but also a strategy that could make this change possible.
As SOLAR, we envisioned this not as the construction of a new platform, but as the formulation of a distinct social technology, one that could allow us to work together, overcome centralization, verticality, opacity and the overall closed nature of cultural policymaking in the country.
That’s how the “Decentralized Program of Pre/Encounters” was born: A 9-month season of local and thematic civic forums, organized by a network of 25 Working Groups, each formed by at least 3 local cultural organizations. Each Pre/Encuentro employed the same methodology to identify and learn from existing civic agendas for cultural policy transformation.
More than 600 people in 15 regions of Peru participated in the program. 371 of them where representatives of local cultural organizations. The program costed more than 50,000 dollars, but only 12% was funded by international cooperation. Most of it was covered by the organizations themselves. Proceedings were generated for each one of the 25 Pre/Encuentros and these documents were used for two things:
To generate the first version of what we are calling “Shared Agenda for Advocacy” —conceived as a strategy and as a tool to transform cultural policies at subnational and national levels, and to give the National Encounter for Culture a new format, oriented towards the validation of this agenda by civil society.
The first version of the Agenda— with its 12 chapters and more than 70 pages — aims to broaden the repertoire for cultural policy design and implementation at the local and national level.
I could talk a lot more about this process and how it eventually led to the creation of the Peruvian Alliance of Cultural Organizations (APOC), but I will surely run out of time. Instead I would like to end my presentation by listing the ways in which I think public investors in the arts and culture can promote cultural citizenship.
First, they can do so by strengthening the capacity of their institutions to promote civic participation, beyond consultation processes. Consultation is only one part of the spectrum of public participation, and working towards processes of collaboration, empowerment and co-creation is essential.
Second, public institutions need to institutionalize mechanisms for pluralistic civic participation, going beyond traditional “Councils of Experts” — which, by the way, are generally formed by white, male and urban professionals. Ministries and Councils of Culture need to invest in making their invocation of civic participation be accompanied by institutional reform. They need to generate nation-wide, permanent and decentralized mechanisms for civic participation, which includes securing human, physical and technological resources to advance this agenda.
Third, public institutions need to adopt open government practices. Working towards “participative cultural governance” will not be enough if we do not work more specifically and technically in aspects of transparency and open data, political accountability and policy co-creation. The global movement towards open government has a lot to offer the global movement for cultural diversity —and vice versa.
Let me finish by saying that cultural citizenship is flourishing through processes where citizens become protagonists in the definition of their own cultural futures, engaging cultural policy by organizing and promoting agendas for cultural policy change. As our last Encuentro’s slogan stated: There is no cultural democracy without civic participation.
Creating vibrant, inclusive, accessible and pluralistic societies means working with civil society, and the quality of that collaboration is important.
Building on Laurenellen McCann’s concept: The State needs to build cultural policies with, not for communities. An understanding of cultural citizenship that does not favor political participation in the definition of cultural governance, is a deal breaker.
We need to understand that the key enabler for cultural citizenship is civic participation in cultural governance.
The future of cultural democracy depends on it.
Thank you.
Text: Mauricio Delfin
Top Photo: Canada Council for the Arts