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Impact
Written by Tully Barnett – Associate Professor at Flinders University
Value in the festivals sector and the broader arts and culture sector that focusses only on economic impact and economic growth is unsustainable for the planet. Our cultural evaluation practices play a role here and as a sector advocating for better evaluation terms for arts and culture is deeply connected to wresting the supporting pillars of our lives away from economic growth, which is unsustainable for the planet, towards outcomes that are more nuanced, more meaningful, more sustainable, more focussed on survival and flourishing cultural sector, communities and the environment.
Arts and cultural festivals are powerful events serving many different functions from bringing humans together to experience arts and culture to serving as a training ground for the development of new art works and even new art forms. Festivals also provide a mechanism for exploring, addressing and building awareness around pressing global concerns.
Festivals are people: both the arts festival sector and the arts festival audiences. The arts sector has identified climate action as a key focus for the sector. The sector expresses this urgency in numerous ways from the individual activities and choices of arts workers to major initiatives by festivals to ensure sustainable practice, through to peak bodies with this single-issue focus such as Julie’s Bicycle in the UK and Cultural Gardeners in Australia.
How can evaluation practices support this work, these urgencies, this planet? What role can evaluation work – the gathering of narrative and data to communicate the progress, successes, outcomes and challenges of cultural work – play in support a post-growth sustainability agenda for arts festivals. Evaluation must go beyond the conventional markers of value, success and benefit that are tied solely to economic growth.
Alternative metrics are urgently required, and internationally practitioners and researchers are working towards this. Some of these metrics may focus specifically on climate action such as reducing carbon footprint in the delivery of festivals but broader socio-cultural and environmental impact also needs better inclusion in policy and evaluation frameworks.
Metrics such as carbon footprint, resource utilization, and socio-environmental impact become critical components of assessing a festival’s value in a post-growth and sustainable world.
One of the challenges here however is the way that many post-growth projects neglect the role of arts and culture in the world. For example, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals declined to establish a goal for arts and culture and as a result projects that apply the SDGs to postgrowth advocacy don’t have arts and culture involved. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, for example, provides a model for keeping a lid on planet-endangering growth (the ecological ceiling) without undermining the social foundations and thereby exacerbating inequalities.
It all comes down to the problem of value. In the past few decades, value in the art and culture sector been required to focus on economic impact. Various attempts to unpick this have had different forms of success.
The arts and culture sector and the festivals that are their communal outpourings can play a strong role in advocating for evaluation frameworks and metrics of success that pull back from a focus on economic growth towards a suite of narratives and data points that highlight social, cultural, aesthetic and community benefits as well as reasonable requirements for contribution to economic growth.
This article has been written and published thanks to the generous support of Green Industries SA (GISA) as part of the Festival City Adelaide Climate Action Roadmap project, funded by GISA through its Lead-Educate-Assist-Promote (LEAP) grant program.
