Why Study the Spread of Culture-led Development Strategies?

Abstract

Culture, entertainment and amenities as urban and regional development policies have received much attention over the last decade. In the wake of recent work on the creative class, culture-led development policies have been applied in cities and regions across the Western world. This article uses quantitative data to examine whether these policies have gained the support of Scandinavian local and regional politicians and, if so, why and how. Drawing on policy diffusion and policy transfer theory, the article examines from where politicians are influenced. Can the sources of influence be characterized as (1) horizontal, (2) top-down or (3) bottom-up? The main finding is that the top-down perspective identifies significant national pressure on local and regional policy-makers, leading to the conclusion that regional and local policy-making in this policy area depends on national policies.

Keywords:

• Culture-led Development Strategies
• policy diffusion
• policy transfer
• regional policy
• cultural policy
• Nordic Countries

Notes

Competition is a central factor in this question. This means that the respondents' answers are not a response to how regional development should be carried out in all instances, but which strategies they would choose in a given situation where there is competition among regions.

There are five regions and 13 regional capitals from Denmark, where—despite regional reform—the former largest city in each county (amt) was surveyed. In Finland, 19 regions (samkommun) and 19 regional capitals were surveyed. In Norway 19 regions (counties) and 18 regional capitals were included and, for Sweden, the numbers are 20 and 22 (again the number of cities is higher than the number of regions, which is due to including two cities from each of the two regions, Skåne and Västra Götaland).

Descriptives for all variables can be seen in Appendix 2.1.

The list of the items is presented in the Appendix.