Innovations in cultural policy and development in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This essay looks at two major tendencies in cultural policy recommendations in Latin America: (1) the economic contribution of arts, heritage and especially the cultural and creative industries; and (2) cultural rights, with a focus on inclusion, access, empowerment, and the integral development/well-being of citizens. The two tendencies, which are part of cultural development policies, are not easily integrated into an all-encompassing policy because they follow different logics and management strategies. Nevertheless, both of these tendencies, which emerged in the heyday of neoliberalism (the 1990s), continue to provide the major justifications for cultural funding, although the current economic crisis has led to budget cuts. After a review of cultural development policies, this essay examines innovative strategies to compensate for scarce funding, including those that seek to bridge both tendencies. The cases examined below correspond to discussions of cultural policies in Latin American forums with hundreds of policy-makers and analysts over the past 20-plus years.

Abbreviations: BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation; CadenAgro: Centro de Apoyo para el Desarrollo de Denominaciones de Origen y Sellos de Calidad de Productos Agroalimentarios; CCI: Cultural and Creative Industries; CEDE: Centro de Estudios de Desarrollo Económico; CMD: Centro de Diseño Metropolitano; CVC: Cultura Viva Comunitaria; ECLAC: Economic Commission for Latin America; ILO: International Labor Organization; IMF: International Monetary Fund; MDG: Millennium Development Goals; MDG-F: Millennium Development Goals Fund; MICA: Mercado de Industrias Creativas de Argentina; MICSUR: Mercado de Industrias Culturales del Sur; MSME: Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises; SEGIB: Secretaría General Iberoamericana; SELA: Latin American Economic System; UCLG: United Cities and Local Governments; UNCTAD: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; UNDP: United Nations Development Programl; UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; US: United States of America

KEYWORDS:

• cultural development
• creative industries
• intersectorial collaboration
• living community culture
• sustainability

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following persons for information they provided for this essay: Sylvie Durán Salvatierra, Ricardo Lira Arias, Alejandra Hernández, Carlos Villaseñor.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Latin American Film, Economics and New Audiovisual Technologies.

2. Youth, urban cultures and digital networks. See also García Canclini and Urteaga Castro Pozo, eds. Cultura y desarrollo: Una vision distinta desde los jóvenes (2011) (Culture and development: a different view from the perspective of youth).

3. Innovation District of Medellín.

4. For an in-depth account, see (Yúdice 2003), chapter 5.

5. The Cultura Viva website, which does not state when it was last updated, refers to 2014, 10 years after the creation of the Cultura Viva program, which includes de Pontos de Cultura (Cultura Viva n/d). Ministry figures have been quite untrustworthy since the removal of President Dilma Rousseff from the presidency by the Brazilian congress on 31 August 2016. Since then, there has been great instability in the Ministry of Culture (several Ministers of Culture resigned and no one occupied the position from June to July 2017 because the previous minister resigned upon hearing evidence of the president’s involvement in a corruption scandal (Demartini 2017). Programs like Cultura Viva do not have much support under President Temer.

6. Living Community Culture.

7. Iberoamerican Secretariat General, a kind of ‘united nations’ of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world.

8. See http://redlgc.blogspot.com/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Miami.

Notes on contributors

George Yúdice

George Yúdice teaches Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Duke UP, 2003), Nuevas tecnologías, música y experiencia (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007), Culturas emergentes en el mundo hispano de Estados Unidos (Madrid: Fundación Alternativas, 2009), and Políticas culturais para a diversidade: lacunas inquietantes, editor, contributor and with an introduction, Revista Observatório (São Paulo, Itaú Cultural, 2016).