MANAGING THE UNMANAGEABLE: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL
PLANNING
Clive Gray
Department of Public Policy
De Montfort University,
Bosworth House
Leicester LE1 9BH
Telephone: 0116 2577787
E-mail: cjg@dmu.ac.uk
1
Introduction
‘Culture’ has been increasingly seen as an important resource for the achievement of a
wide variety of policy goals from those of urban regeneration to health. The extent to
which such an amorphous subject as ‘culture’ is actually capable of delivering the
benefits that other policy arenas are concerned with is currently, however, open to
question. Research that has investigated the contribution of culture to the attainment
of specific policy goals has been undertaken for some years (see, for example, the
early discussions in Myerscough, 1988 and Griffiths, 1993) with inconclusive results.
The reasons for such lack of clarity can be seen to lie in two distinct areas:
definitional problems concerning cultural content; and endogenous particularities and
peculiarities concerning the cultural policy sector itself. This paper seeks to identify
the precise nature of these difficulties, and to investigate the extent to which cultural
planning, as an explicit attempt to mobilise ‘culture’ in the cause of policy, can
possibly overcome them.
Identifying the Problem
The development of something of a ‘cultural turn’ in British governmental circles is a
relatively new phenomenon. While precursors to the current spate of involvement
with cultural matters can be traced, at the local government level, back to the 1980s
(Greater London Council, 1985) it was the victory of the Labour Party in the 1997
general election that served to make ‘culture’ an important word in policy circles –
not least with the change of name of the central government department with
responsibility for this area from the Department for National Heritage to the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Since that date there have been
numerous attempts to integrate culture more fully into governmental activities at all
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levels from the local to the national (see, for example, Department for Culture, Media
and Sport, 1999a; 1999b; 2004; Scottish Executive, 2006b), and an increasing
tendency to use culture in an instrumental fashion for the attainment of policy goals
other than the cultural (Gray, 2006).
There have, however, been some difficulties with this new-found enthusiasm for
culture as a form of policy panacea. These problems are sufficient to raise doubts as to
the extent to which the use of culture is actually capable of fulfilling any of the
demands that are placed upon it, either in its’ own right, or in an instrumental fashion.
The problems that exist operate in a mutually reinforcing fashion to create a position
of acute structural weakness for the cultural policy sector in Britain. By themselves,
the factors that are involved in this problematic situation are not necessarily
weaknesses per se - in other political systems they can actually be a source of political
and policy strength for the sector – but, in Britain, they act as severe limits within
which the sector must operate and have significant political and policy consequences
for it.
The problems of the sector can be summed up as being:

the absence of a clearly defined arena of action;

a lack of political significance for the cultural policy sector;

the fragmented organisational universe that it operates within;

the variation in geographical scale that it operates within; and

the effectively reactive, rather than proactive, nature of policy development
that it involves.
3
The manner in which these affect the opportunities for ‘culture’ to have an
independent and effective policy role within the British system of government is
discussed in the following sections.
‘Culture’: Defining the Indefinable
Williams (1976, p. 76) argued that ‘culture is one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language’, and the most immediate difficulty with
using ‘culture’ as the basis for policy action lies precisely in this complexity.
‘Culture’ is effectively an essentially contested concept (Gray, 2004, p. 44), and, as
such, it can be defined in multiple ways with no possibility of determining the
adequacy, or, indeed, the correctness of any of these definitions. While this leaves
room for the use of multiple approaches to policy, aimed at differing objectives, and
employing differing means towards policy ends, it also raises inevitable questions
about whether any of these policy initiatives are actually ‘cultural’ in the first place.
Before examining this question, however, it is helpful to see how ‘culture’ is actually
being used within government itself. Discovering what is understood by the term
within governmental circles will help to identify the context within which current
concerns are located.
In practice governmental actors, in particular the DCMS, are extremely careful about
how they use the word ‘culture’, preferring to discuss the ‘scope’ of culture rather
than a definitive object of concern (DCMS, 2000, p. 7). Developing from Rotherham
Metropolitan Borough’s cultural strategy from the 1990s, ‘culture’ is divided into two
dimensions – the material and the valuative. The former is made up of specific
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resources (ranging from museums to children’s playgrounds to wildlife habitats) and
activities (such as writing and countryside recreation), while the latter consists of less
tangible factors that are assumed to be present amongst members of society (such as
‘shared memories, experiences and identity’, ’diverse cultural, religious and historic
backgrounds’ and ‘what we consider valuable to pass on to future generations’).
Such an approach to considerations of ‘culture’ draws from two major sources. The
first derives from planning with an emphasis on tangible attributes of habitats and
activities that are amenable to management and manipulation (see, for example,
Evans, 2001). The second derives from rather dated anthropological concerns with
understanding the totality of human societies and the social glue that binds them
together, with this glue being labelled ‘culture’. In this respect the emphasis is on a
conception of ‘culture’ as an entity (a ‘thing’) that is held by individuals and
organisations, and which is capable of being managed and purposively transformed.
This view was commonly held within anthropology until the late 1960s/early 1970s
but has been largely replaced by a more active conception of culture that views it as a
process concerned with meanings rather than as a specific entity in itself (see Wright,
1998).
Thus, the version of ‘culture’ that has become dominant within the major
governmental discourse concerning the subject adopts what is effectively an
instrumental conception of it, even when talking about its’ valuative dimension: it is
seen as a set of resources or tools that can be managed in a top-down fashion for predetermined ends. The concern with culture as a variable that can be specifically
related to concrete phenomena and which is capable of being controlled and managed
5
through human choice goes against the more recent anthropological version of culture
and, instead of being perceived as a living set of processes, becomes merely one more
resource to be controlled.
Operationalising ‘Culture’
The development of such instrumental approaches to the management of cultural
resources is a relatively recent one that is related to the development of commodified
conceptions of public policy (Gray 2006). A major problem with the reformulation of
policy concerns that this gives rise to is that it is exceedingly difficult to identify
precisely how ‘culture’ contributes to the attainment of policy goals, whether these be
the goals of cultural policy per se, or those of other policy sectors to which cultural
policy has become ‘attached’ for instrumental reasons (see Gray, 2002). To a large
extent this is a consequence of the rather nebulous status of much of what is contained
within the definition of ‘culture’ that is being employed within governmental circles:
how, for example, is it possible to demonstrate that parks and fashion, let alone
individual relationships and shared memories, make a positive, identifiable,
contribution to goals of social inclusion? It is possible that these effects may exist, if
not directly then through the unintended consequences of policy interventions, but
identifying the causal mechanisms that are involved and the precise manner in which
they work are extremely complicated issues of analysis that cannot be simply
hypothesised, modelled or measured.
The difficulties that arise here are largely those that are associated with attempts by
government to operationalise ‘culture’ as a measurable component within assessments
of policy effectiveness. It has been argued by Belfiore (2004, p. 200), for example,
6
that attempts to demonstrate a positive benefit from the utilisation of cultural policies
to resolve the concerns of other policy sectors have only served ‘to generate evergrowing expectations that they are, quite simply, unable to meet’. This pessimistic
view is reinforced when measurements based upon the principles of ‘evidence-based
policy’ within the cultural sector are examined.
The range of such measurements has varied considerably and can be found, in official
versions, in the Public Service Agreement (PSA) Targets of the DCMS (DCMS,
2005); the Best Value indicators and Key Lines of Enquiry of the Audit Commission
(Audit Commission, 2005); and the Local Performance Indicators of the Audit
Commission and the Improvement and Development Agency. The utility of these
measures, however, is something of an open question in terms of cultural policy itself.
In the case of the four PSAs of the DCMS the operative words are ‘enhance’, ‘halt’,
‘increase’ and ‘improve’, but only one of them refers to questions of the quality of
cultural provision itself (PSA 1 referring to ‘high quality PE and school sport’:
DCMS, 2005, p. 6). The Key Lines of Enquiry for Culture are largely tick-box
assessments of the presence or absence of certain managerial tools and information,
with little direct concern with the content of the cultural services that are involved
(Audit Commission, 2005). Similarly the Best Value indicators for cultural services
(BV 114, 117, 119a-c, 170a-c, and 219a-c) are statements of number (of visitors to
museums (170), or numbers of conservation areas (219), for example) or of mere
existence (as in ‘does the authority have a local cultural strategy’ (114)). This BV
measure does also involve tick-box assessments of whether, for example, groups have
been consulted in the drawing-up of the plan, and the score that a local authority
receives on this is dependent upon how many criteria have been met – regardless of
7
the quality or even quantity of such consultation. The absence of concern in each of
these measures with the content of cultural policies, or with assessment of whether
they succeed as cultural policies, reflects the limitations of an over-reliance on
quantitative measures in terms of assessing the efficiency or effectiveness (however
these may be defined) of policy interventions.
Commissioned reviews of the evidence of the contribution of culture to policy
concerns such as ‘quality of life’ (Scottish Executive, 2006a) have demonstrated some
of the difficulties of employing measures of intangible objects, whilst others have
identified the limited extent of persuasive, numerical, evidence in the field of urban
redevelopment (Evans and Shaw, 2004). Case studies of cultural services in action
(for example, IDeA, 2004) further indicate the problems that exist in unambiguously
demonstrating that ‘culture’ is the sole factor that leads to improvements in a range of
social concerns, from education and health to transport and environmental
improvement. Even the most optimistic literature review concerning the positive
impact of cultural, arts and sports policies points out that there are major problems in
generalisation from the available evidence given the limits to comparability that are
present in the studies that exist (Ruiz, 2004).
Outside of governmental circles the difficulties of operationalising ‘culture’ to
demonstrate an unambiguously successful role for it in terms of public policy have
been equally noted, often at the level of basic methodological problems in dealing
with the concept. Thus, in the case of art therapy ‘there is a notable absence of hard
evidence’ to demonstrate its’ utility or effectiveness (Madden and Bloom, 2004); the
identification of benefits, for either society as a whole or at the individual level, from
8
utilising the arts, is seen to depend upon the development of completely new criteria
for impact assessment that are often, by their nature, actually non-assessable in any
straight-forward, conventional, sense (see, for example, the contributions in Cowling,
2004). An attempt to undertake a large-scale evaluation of the Poems in the Waiting
Room programme (where selected poems were made available for therapeutic
purposes in hospital, health centre and other medical environments) depended upon
anecdote and other unsupported claims to demonstrate the utility of the scheme,
largely because ‘the precise impact of the poems displayed in the waiting room was
always going to be hard to measure. Poetry is by definition a matter of quality and
subjectivity’ (Wolf, 2002, p. 6).
Apart from the difficulty of evaluating the component elements of cultural policies
there is the added problem that attempts to evaluate the value or impact of cultural
policies in terms of other agendas (such as social inclusion or economic redevelopment) normally involves assessing these other agendas on criteria that are
quite alien to the cultural sphere in the first place: what is an appropriate measure of
success in terms of social inclusion, for example, is not necessarily going to be so for
a cultural policy. Long and Bramham (2006), for example, have argued that even
within the social inclusion arena it is possible to identify at least five types of
approach that could be adopted to fulfil the requirements of inclusion through the
utilisation of cultural policies, none of which actually assesses these policies in
cultural policy terms, but only through their instrumental contribution to the social
inclusion agenda. As such, evaluation of such policies would be purely instrumental
in intent and would have no bearing at all on whether the policies involved actually
are cultural policies or whether they are social inclusion policies manqué.
9
This problem of inappropriate assessment has raised questions of whether culture has
a meaningful policy existence that is independent of the instrumental policy concerns
of governments (Gray, 2002, pp. 86-88; Holden, 2004) and, if it is, how it can be
demonstrated to be a valid existence within its’ own sectoral terms. Jowell (2004), as
the Secretary of State for the DCMS, has provided political support for culture in
cultural, and avowedly non-instrumental, terms - even if this was expressed in terms
that would not have been out of place in the 19th century – indicating that a complete
replacement of cultural concerns for those of the policy areas to which it has become
attached is seen, by relevant policy actors at the core of the political system, to be at
least problematic, if not positively damaging, for the central concerns of cultural
policy itself. This lack of autonomy for the policy sector derives not only from the
instrumental or attachment strategies that have been employed within it, but also from
the structural position that it locates within the sphere of public policy.
Structuring the Unstructurable
The structure of the cultural policy sector displays certain peculiarities that mark it off
from many other sectors. The problems of actually defining the content of the sector,
and the consequent problems of developing coherent and effective tools for policy
evaluation and assessment have contributed to the position where the construction of
an effectively autonomous sphere for cultural policy has become, politically,
extremely difficult to achieve, but it is not only these factors that contribute to this
position: the manner in which culture and cultural policy have been managed by
political actors has had a major effect on this.
10
Many of these structural factors exist in a position of mutually reinforcing weaknesses
for the sector, combining to establish a position where the development of
instrumental approaches to cultural policy are neither surprising nor easily avoided;
and where the creation of a coherent set of policies that will satisfy, efficiently and
effectively, the requirements that are made of them is open to severe doubt. Dealing
with these structural factors in turn will demonstrate their impact on the field of
cultural policy. While this will be less successful in demonstrating how their interconnected nature provides a mutually reinforcing set of limits to effective action,
indications of this will be provided in the examples that are utilised to demonstrate the
case.
Cultural policy has acquired a great deal of significance in recent years, largely based
around claims that ‘culture’ is a key resource for bringing together diverse policy
concerns, and serving as a focus for solutions to a range of disparate problems (Gray,
2004). The extent to which this new significance is actually matched by effective
political support is, however, another matter. Questions of ‘culture’ within the British
political system have always tended to be placed in a position of low political value
(Gray, 2000, pp. 198-203), partly for reasons of fear of accusations of state censorship
and control, and partly because of a perception that ‘culture’ is a matter for
individuals and not the state. Such views tend to see involvement with culture as
creating as many political problems as it solves and has a long British history as
displayed when Lord Melbourne, as Prime Minister in the 1830s, declared ‘God help
the government who meddles in art’ (Minihan, 1977, p. 60) (with the assumption that
art has something to do with culture!).
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The recent development of something of a ‘cultural turn’ in government, particularly
central government, could be taken as an indication that this traditional reluctance to
become involved in the sector has started to change. Certainly there has been an
increasing emphasis on the necessity for government to consider the cultural
dimension in its activities, as demonstrated, for example, in the guidance to English
local authorities for the preparation of their Community Strategies (DCMS, 2004),
and in the Scottish Executive’s response to their Cultural Review (Scottish Executive,
2006), which discusses questions of cultural entitlement in a much more positive
fashion than would normally be expected within the British political system. (The fact
that there are major criticisms of the Scottish Executive’s position and proposals for
future policy development from within the Scottish cultural and arts communities
should not detract from the attempt to do something original that is being proposed:
see the discussion at www.Connectorscotland.org for the 24th January 2006).
The seeming political acceptance of an effective role for ‘culture’ is based, however,
almost entirely upon instrumental reasons with support being expressed in terms that
assume that culture will add something positive to policy, either in terms of improving
the effectiveness of any given policy development or in terms of a general
contribution to social well-being. In short, ‘culture’ is supported not because of its’
cultural effects but because of the contribution that it makes to other policy concerns.
The extent to which the current political rhetoric that emphasises the importance of
culture to these other policy concerns will survive the continued lack of direct
evidence to support it is an open question. It is possible that new evaluation and
assessment criteria may be developed (see Cowling, 2004; Holden, 2004), although
whether these will satisfy the competing demands of the cultural policy sector and the
12
other sectors to which it has become instrumentally attached must be questioned –
even if this question is beginning to be seen as a sterile one that should be moved
away from as a basis for considering the value of cultural policies (Belfiore and
Bennett, 2006).
The fact that culture has only recently begun to receive attention – whether in
instrumental terms, rather than in cultural ones, or not - implies that the sector has yet
to develop a political significance of its own, remaining as an arena of ‘low’ rather
than ‘high’ politics – ‘residual matters’ of ‘embellishment and detail’ (Bulpitt, 1983,
pp. 3, 29) rather than matters of central political importance for elected political actors
at any level within the British political system as a whole (Gray, 2001). The lack of
detailed political involvement with culture as a policy sector is partly a consequence
of the ambiguities surrounding the subject that develop from the difficulties of
developing a clear definition of what the sector is supposed to be dealing with, and
partly a consequence of the fact that it has never been treated as a matter of major
political significance before. This has created something of a chicken-and-egg
situation for the sector where it has minimal political significance because it has never
had it, and because it has never had it, it cannot get it.
The failure to be treated as an important policy issue has led to a dissipation of
organisational effort in terms of management, direction and control. Apart from the
obvious differences between the operations of the public and the private sectors of the
economy – and large parts of British cultural policy are determined in the ‘cultural
industries’ (see Pratt, 2005) of the latter rather than in the former – there are also
significant differences in the manner in which the British state functions within the
13
cultural sector. At the very least the organisational dimension of cultural policy as a
whole is characterised by large-scale organisational fragmentation: within the state
system there are policy-making bodies for culture at the central government (for
example, the DCMS), regional (for example, the Scottish Executive, Welsh and
Northern Irish Assemblies, and the English Regional Cultural Consortia) and local
(for example, local authorities) levels. This fragmentation is exacerbated by the
limited inter-organisational linkages that currently exist between the disaggregated
members of the policy universe (see Gray, 2004), and by the ‘low politics’ status of
the policy area. The fact that in England and Wales cultural policy is effectively a
discretionary activity at the local level reinforces this lack of political muscle for the
sector (Gray, 2002: in Scotland and Northern Ireland there are some components of
‘culture’, such as the arts, that have got a statutory basis), and this makes it heavily
reliant upon the involvement of key political actors in the system before effective
action can be developed and adopted within the state machinery.
A by-product of this organisational fragmentation has been the creation of policies
that are directed at distinct geographical levels within the overall system, with little in
place in terms of effective co-ordination and collaboration between them. Given the
discretionary nature of state involvement in this policy sector across much of the
United Kingdom, and the limited nature of actual state activity within it as well, this
is, perhaps, hardly surprising, but, in terms of the impact of the policy sector itself, it
places severe limits on the development of effective public policy. At one level this
could be taken as actually being an appropriate approach to adopt towards cultural
policy, allowing, as it does, for the development of specific local responses to specific
local cultures, environments and circumstances. In terms of developing a coherent
14
policy approach, however, it opens up possibilities for the development of wideranging policy disparities between parts of the country and the potential for conflicts
over policy between geographical levels.
The latter has been seen in the manner in which Arts Council England took over the
Regional Arts Boards in 2001. This was presented as being an attempt on the part of
Arts Council England to simplify funding arrangements for the arts, but it was also
clearly a consequence of deep-rooted structural problems concerning wider relations
between the two levels (Gray, 2000, ch. 6). The solution, involving a major
centralisation of the arts system, has not necessarily resolved these deep-rooted
problems but has, instead, re-located them as being a problem of internal management
and co-ordination rather than as being an inter-organisational one. It is probable that
such clashes between geographical and organisational levels would increase in scale
and severity, given the fragmentation of the organisational universe that exists, if
culture were ever to become a significant matter of political concern, particularly if
the lack of clarity over what the sector is actually dealing with remains in place.
This lack of clarity also has an effect upon the manner in which policy within the
sector is developed, created, implemented and evaluated. It has been argued that the
general commodification of policy has specific effects upon the manner in which
policy is treated within policy sectors – leading to fragmentation, selectivity and
individualisation in policy content; an increasing reliance on economic rationality in
policy choice; and a reduction in the power of previously dominant groups in the
processes of policy formulation and implementation (Gray, 2000, pp. 27-9). In the
case of cultural policy, commodification has also been argued to have contributed
15
towards an increasing emphasis upon instrumental policy forms (Gray, 2006). The
overall effect of these changes within the cultural policy sector has been to reinforce
already existing tendencies towards a reactive, rather than proactive, approach to
policy.
The fact that it is difficult to develop an unambiguous and generally accepted idea of
what ‘cultural’ policy should consist of, and be directed at, leaves open the possibility
of creating a diverse range of policies, loosely labelled ‘cultural’, that are directed at a
wide range of distinct policy targets. Given the lack of political weight that is given to
the cultural sector it is not surprising that the ‘attachment’ (Gray, 2002) of cultural
policies to political issues that carry greater political weight has taken place. In this
process the emphasis of policy becomes directed away from cultural issues per se and,
instead, reacts to the demands of other parts of the policy agenda. As such the cultural
policy area is likely to remain as a secondary concern for policy actors in general and,
without a major sea-change within the sector itself, it is equally likely to remain in a
position where actions are determined by the requirements of exogenous policy
concerns.
In practice there are examples where cultural policy has developed as a positive set of
policy initiatives rather than as simply a reactive off-shoot of other policy concerns.
Such examples have tended to be primarily local in orientation, rather than regional
and national, and are usually driven by conscious political choices being made by
local actors. The importance of the role of local policy ‘champions’ in driving policy
development within cultural policy has become increasingly recognised as being of
key importance for the sector, not only in Britain but elsewhere too (see Dwyer and
16
Frankel, 2002, pp. 61-7). This reliance on a limited number of policy actors to get
cultural issues taken seriously reflects, again, on the limited political significance that
is attached to the sector and the problems that this creates for developing proactive
policy initiatives.
Cultural Planning: Solution or Panacea?
Clearly there are significant difficulties involved in trying to use ‘culture’ as a basis
for public policies. Attempts to resolve these problems do exist, involving a range of
strategies from the development of new assessment criteria for the evaluation of the
impact of cultural policies (Holden, 2004), to new methods of understanding cultural
value per se (Throsby, 2001), to new approaches to integrating culture into the
activities of governments and organisations (whether public, voluntary or private). In
respect of the latter of these changes, the development of cultural planning approaches
has been promoted as offering the possibility of not only producing a meaningful set
of specific policies oriented at various understandings of ‘culture’, but also as
providing an over-arching framework within which democratic governments can
effectively and efficiently serve their publics (see Everitt, 1999, for example).
The basic premise behind the cultural planning approach is that there should be a
wide-ranging (if not ‘cross-cutting’ and ‘joined-up’) approach adopted to matters of
community development, and that this approach should be based around the
integrated management of ‘cultural resources’ (Ghilardi, 2005, pp. 8-10; Gray, 2004).
These resources are seen to consist of a range of activities, structures and identifying
characteristics (for example, ‘communities of interest’ within a local area based
around common identifications; local dialects; tourist guides; the quality of the built
17
environment; specifically local products; and the diversity of retail facilities can all be
included: see Bianchini, 1996) and should, it is argued by proponents of cultural
planning, be utilised to inform the management and development of local areas.
The development of cultural planning approaches from the 1980s onwards has taken
place to the greatest extent in the Anglophonic world, although it is now beginning to
be utilised in continental Europe with increasing frequency as well. Criticism of some
aspects of the approach has also been developing, concentrating on a perception that it
incorporates a commodified perception of the aims of public policy and that it is
predicated on an unhelpful definition of ‘culture’ (Stevenson, 2004). The latter of
these criticisms is potentially the more damaging of the two as it implies that, firstly,
there is a better definition of the key term for this policy sector, and, secondly, that the
success or otherwise of policy in this area depends upon an adequate definition of the
term.
Given the complexities of dealing with an essentially contested concept it is hardly
surprising that the first of these positions is held: it is impossible for any definition to
please all of the people all of the time in this area. The latter indicates that there are
serious political consequences that arise from how ‘culture’ is to be understood, both
in terms of the potential policies that may be pursued to fulfil a ‘cultural’ remit, and in
terms of how policies are to be assessed for their utility. A simple acceptance of the
position that there cannot be a single definition that suits all circumstances and actors
means that is possible to, in the Maoist phrase, ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’. At the
same time, however, it also means that any and all of these blooms run the risk of
18
being subject to criticism from a wide range of directions, with this criticism not
necessarily being appropriate for the flower that is being considered.
The inherent vagueness that exists within the cultural planning approach about the
nature of the resources that are to be incorporated within it, and how they are to be
utilised, becomes a positive problem when governments are concerned, as the current
British one is, with the utilisation of an evidence-based approach to public policy. The
problems with such an approach for an area that is exceedingly difficult to pin down
in terms of causality and unambiguous evidence will always make it subject to
criticism in ways that medical interventions, for example, are usually not. As a further
weakness for the cultural policy sector, to add to those already in place, the failure to
provide the forms of quantitative (or even qualitative) evidence that are required to
justify state support for cultural interventions is likely to become increasingly
significant. Regardless of the in-built weaknesses of lack of political support and
geographical and organisational fragmentation, the inability of the sector to
demonstrate how and why it is important at anything other than an anecdotal level is
unlikely to provide a means for improving the former or of encouraging a reduction of
the latter.
In effect the attempt to develop a meaningful form of state cultural policy has a large
number of hurdles to clear. Whilst governments are wedded to particular and, in the
case of culture at least, inappropriate forms of policy evaluation it is unlikely that
sufficient political support will be generated for the sector to be capable of
withstanding the deflationary effect on expectations that policy failure is likely to
bring in its’ wake. The complexities of the policy sector are sufficient to ensure that
19
whatever is done or not done within it will be subject to considerable criticism.
Attempts to find a workable political space for culture through policies of attachment
and instrumentalisation are unlikely by themselves to be successful in overcoming
such complaint.
20
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