Vision. The idea of “having a vision”. The “Vision Statement, Mission Statement, and Values” structure we find in strategies and policies has dominated the strategy and policy field for a quite some time. As a consultant I’ve spent a lot of time in workshops and focus groups with clients and local governments, with post-its and design sprints and lego and role play and what not creating some beautiful vision statements. I can purple-prose it with the best of them!
But from an arts policy/strategy perspective the focus on Vision is a dangerous distraction. Look carefully at the language:
“We want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish.” (Arts Council England’s Let’s Create, 2020)
“a place for every story, a story for every place” (Australia’s national cultural policy, Revive 2023),
“Amplify our arts and culture to make New Zealand a creative powerhouse with global reach” (Amplify: A Creative and Cultural Strategy for New Zealand 2025 -2030)
Our own National Culture Policy (now out of date) stated in its original draft that its vision was to “put creativity at the heart of every community”. This was changed in later versions and the current publicly available version doesn’t seem to have a single vision, rather it has three “fundamental principles”:
- Recognising the value of culture and creativity to the individual and society
- Supporting creative practice and cultural participation
- Cherishing our cultural heritage
Check through any amount of arts plans, policies, strategies, be they published by national or local government or national agencies and you will find versions of these visions of the future.
Don’t get me wrong, I think all of these are admirable, I’ve written many versions of them over the years but they are not policy (and certainly not strategy). If anything they capture the ongoing failure of policy. Let me explain.
All of the above are “value positions”. A value position simply tells us what the policy maker believes or wants to be seen to believe. Policy is something else entirely. Real, effective policy starts when you take the value position seriously enough to ask the question: Why is it not like that already?
Why isn’t New Zealand’s arts and culture a creative powerhouse with global reach?
Why isn’t everybody’s creativity in England given the chance to flourish?
Why isn’t there a place for every story in Australia?
Why have you not recognised the value of culture and creativity to the individual and society?
Why isn’t creative practice and participation supported?
Why isn’t the distinctive societal value of the arts recognised by local and national politicians, decision-makers and officials in a wide range of departments and agencies and provided for accordingly?
As policy makers, the moment we challenge the vision and ask the follow-up “why isn’t it like that already” we are forcing a diagnosis that reaches beyond the sector under consideration and back into the wider system. We are forcing a seriousness of intent.
Are these problems that are hidden in the vision statement resulting from an education issue, an inequality issue, an ideological issue? Is creativity absent from lots of communities because the private economics of making art outside a major urban centre are subject to extreme market failure? Is it because funding structures which should correct market failure don’t understand the nature of that failure? Is it because increasing inequality and regressive redistribution policies have reduced the capacity of local governments – and local government arts offices in particular. Is it because of a wider cultural problem that really doesn’t believe in the value of arts? Is it because arts, critical thinking, and reflective practice have been downplayed in education for decades as we attempt to turn out employment-ready students?
Every response we make to the question “why isn’t it like that already” (particularly in a situation where policy action and investment has been consistent over time) points us toward a different policy instrument, a different budget line, a different accountability structure. If we don’t do the diagnosis then we’re not doing the policy and we end up with something akin to a mood board with a ministerial foreword.
I also need to add that this is probably not deliberate. It happens when we think an aspiration is an output. When “positive thinking” protects us from social realities. We’ve said we want to build 300,000 houses by 2030 and that’s the job done; we’ve said we recognise the value of culture and creativity to the individual and society, so that’s the job done. Unfortunately, in so many cases, the difficult middle bit of the policy process, the diagnosis, the problem definition and identification, the selection of the appropriate instrument, the costing, the accountability is simply ignored and replaced with random ideas on how to realise the “vision” without asking why we need to have such vision in the first place. If we cannot address the primary cause of a problem, that problem ain’t going away and we end up with what governments find easiest to fund: programmes, initiatives, visibility etc., and then ten years later we measure the success of the aspiration by the existence of the aspiration.
It’s true, that when we ask the question “why isn’t it like that already?” we create a difficulty for policy makers in arts/culture in that the answers can’t be found inside the cultural brief. For example participation in the arts is one of the most reliably stratified activities in any society. Engagement tracks education first, then income and then geography. We learn about it from infancy (inherited social capital), our parents can afford the classes and the shows, we have access to facilities. A child who receives sustained arts education participates for life; a child who doesn’t, largely doesn’t. A family choosing between heating and a theatre ticket or a music class has not made a cultural choice. A town with no realistic public transport to the nearest arts facility has not lost interest in art, it has lost access to it.
The great Indian economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach distinguishes between the formal freedom to do something and the real capability to do it – what he describes as the substantive freedom to live a life one has reason to value. A free museum in a city a two-hour bus ride away is a formal freedom. Whether it becomes a real capability depends on what Sen calls conversion factors: income, education, time, transport, confidence, health, the sense that the building is actually for you. Much cultural policy has spent decades supplying formal freedoms – open doors, free admission, “access” schemes – and then being surprised that the same social groups keep turning up. Sen would not be puzzled. Resources are not capabilities. An open door is not an invitation, and it is certainly not a bus ticket, a childcare place, or twelve years of music or dance education.
Those cultural policies – and we produce a lot of them here – that are built on visions that include the word “everybody” are really just a cultural aspiration and a hopeful claim about the distribution of capabilities, and therefore a claim about equity in education policy, income policy, and spatial policy. And this is precisely why scholars like Justin O’Connor and the great economist Marianna Mazzucato argue that art/culture are not stand-alone sectors but part of the underlying foundation of a society and an economy. Which is why, in an arts policy context, it’s really much easier to publish the aspiration than the diagnosis. The diagnosis implicates departments that haven’t signed the foreword, as it were.
Let’s at least be Honest in Policy
So let’s be honest in our next wave of policy making. Building policy honestly is not mysterious. When we’re building the next arts policy or strategy let’s sidestep the purple prose as quickly as we can. Here’s a workable approach:
1. State the value position and then convert it into a gap/problem/challenge. So if the vision is “Creativity at the heart of every community” then ask why isn’t it already there? Don’t just map deficits, define terms and look for causes.
2. Diagnose the cause. Why does the deficit/challenge exist? Market failure, cost disease, funding mismatch, underinvestment, capture by incumbents etc, and then look for the structural determinants: education, income, inequality, place. This is where the real analytical work happens and it is the step most policy documents omit, usually because the answers implicate previous policy and partly because they implicate other departments entirely. Remember when we ask “why isn’t it already like that?” a beautiful vision statement can become an admission of previous failures. And nobody likes that…
3. Choose the instrument that fits your analysis. De we need supply-side subsidy, or demand-side stimulus in the form of regulation, direct provision, tax expenditure/breaks. For example if we discovered that artists can’t afford to live in the community and that’s a problem, then a festival grant is the wrong instrument, however photogenic. And if your diagnosis tells you that we’re dealing with capability deprivation (in Sen’s sense), then the instrument may not be a cultural one at all: it might be an urgent need for arts education on the curriculum rather than at its margins, or income supports, or better transport, or just keeping a local venue open, or treating the town as the venue. We need to evaluate every policy instrument by the capabilities it actually expands, not the opportunities it formally supplies. The great systems analyst Donella Meadows argued that the deepest leverage points are in system structure and goals, not in parameters. Regrettably government arts policy loves tinkering at the parameters (another scheme, another fund) because they are the shallowest and safest place to act – dipping toes in the ocean.
4. Don’t lie to yourself about the money. As a colleague once remarked to me, a policy without a price is a press release. Don’t just see what change is left in the government coffers, don’t set the budget based on last year’s allocation, and don’t suppose that all of the actions can be funded from a single department. Be honest about what you want to see happen, ask yourself who can deliver these outputs and outcomes for you, and then ask them what it will cost to do so. Pay the price and stop exploiting the sector. If the state won’t or can’t pay what the diagnosis says the problem costs, and can’t find alternative investment sources then say so, admit it and scale the ambition to the money – do the reverse of the current practice, which continually scales the language up and lets the money stand still. And remember that funding that is not index linked at a minimum and increasing year on year is a managed decline. And remember that the actual number is meaningless – it’s what can be done with the number that’s important.
5. Keep a clear eye on things. From a policy perspective it’s really important to monitor results (accept feedback and change the policy if appropriate), so who measures the situation in five years, against what baseline, and what happens if nothing has changed or if things have worsened? The problem with most arts/culture policy documents is that they are aspirational, and aspirational documents are pretty much unfalsifiable. It is the nature of good policy that it must be falsifiable, which is exactly why it is harder to publish.
At the end of the day, it’s a really useful policy stress-test to search the document for the sentence that begins “creativity should be…” or “we want a country where…” and includes “…everybody”. Then look for the paragraph that explains why it currently isn’t. If that paragraph is missing, what you are holding is not a policy. It is a value position – and the communities and people it invokes will still be waiting at the heart of nothing when the next policy is launched to replace it.
Values are where policy starts. Its not where the work happens.