Yesterday I addressed a monograph on the value of conferences in the pursuit of developing cultural policy. The authors noted that generally, with the exception of really disorganized groups, meetings of this sort were not terribly valueable. My last entry looked at the barriers to success, today I want to review the solutions the authors suggest.

I should amend my former statement a little–the authors believe that conferences don’t contribute to the formation of policy currently. They do suggest ways to remove the aforementioned barriers so that constructive work might result. Among them are:

-“Build and foster policy communities within art and culture. Consider the creation of a convening authority an independent body, or honest broker, that can support special forums (what we are calling “policy thrusts”) to bring together different parts of the cultural sector to engage in focused and deliberate dialogue and to move from strategy and problem identification to consensus building, action plans, common research needs, and coalitions around pressing policy problems.”

-“Define problems, set agendas, develop policy alternatives and reform government services and programs. Arts leaders should encourage foundations and governments to create taskforces, working groups, and special commissions to advise and interject in policy conversations at the local, state and federal levels.”

In this regard they suggest keeping the focus of the taskforces limited “not simply “the arts in San Diego,” for example, but a topic that can yield practical policy recommendations: for example, youth and creativity; quality of life; spaces for creativity; cultural districts; creative industries; and support for working artists,etc etc..”

-“Improve methods to document policy discussions at annual meetings.” This seems to be exactly what Andrew Taylor’s band of graduate students have been doing at the National Performing Arts Convention. In fact, the report explicitly suggests using graduate students to act as recorders of “all policy-relevant comments. By identifying these statements, tracking policy concerns and more systematically documenting what is discussed, association staff and the broader membership can better gauge the policy dimensions of a conference session.”

-“Offer professional training and development: policy education through workshops.” Since many cultural administrators aren’t practiced in the process of policy making, the authors suggest workshops that empower people with the tools to do so.

-“Organize policy roundtables” As I mentioned yesterday, one of the research findings of this study was that conference participants felt more was accomplished in informal discussions after a meeting than at the meeting itself. The authors suggest that such post-event gatherings should be organized to encourage discussion by those who can attend.

-“Diversify participants and panelists and publicize and promote cultural policy expert.” As mentioned yesterday, the roster of speakers at conferences has become increasingly insular of late. The authors encourage not only inviting government officials, but people from other industries who can provide insight about policy development.

-“Call attention to the policy dimension of meetings…In order to highlight the policy dimension of meetings and to help attendees identify policy-relevant conversations, associations might consider identifying a “policy track” at their annual meetings…A track is simply a set of conference sessions that fit within a general approach or topic area. Many sessions can be cross-listed under more than one track.”

-“Conduct formal, in depth evaluations: National service associations should consider employing more ambitious evaluations – similar in scope to the recent pARTicipate2001 assessment in order to trace over a period of time the learning and action that results from a meeting. These evaluations can reveal how participants (from junior- to senior level arts professionals) approach meetings differently and how they take away from these gatherings.

-“Cross-sector initiative. Foundations interested in advancing cultural policy might consider supporting a special initiative to connect cultural policy to more established policy fields and help cultural leaders participate in broader policy discussions in their communities, states or regions.”

-“Integrate cultural policy concerns onto the agenda of other policy professionals. There is a wide gap between the professional planning community and the cultural policy community. Planners need to think more integrally about arts and culture, and they need to understand more fully how the arts can serve the goals of community/urban/regional planning.”

Some interesting things to ponder. I would certainly be more interested in attending conferences/meetings for policy education if people began to adopt this approach. (This is not to say I don’t enjoy attending conferences for the other educational and networking opportunities they offer. I have just been frustrated by a lack of what I perceived to be constructive, practical solutions.)

For all the material I directly quoted from the report, there is still plenty I omitted (specific examples of what the authors were referring to in many cases) so it would probably behoove anyone interested in policy formation to read the whole of the monograph.

Even though I know Andrew Taylor has been in Pittsburgh at the National Performing Arts Convention this past week, I have been checking his blog reguarly. Even though I have seen the same entry that he will be out of town about 5 times now, today I actually followed one of the links. He and about 20 grad students have been attempting to track and report the events of the convention in real time and report back to the convention before it is over.

The link I followed actually took me to the Bolz Center webpage where I noticed he had a link to a report by a group at Princeton University about the value of such conventions and meetings in forming cultural policy. The monograph, “The Measure of Meetings: Forums, Deliberation, and Cultural Policy” finds that with few exceptions, conferences don’t help set policy at all.

Because I often find conferences to be fairly useless in this regard, I was interested to see what the exceptions might be and what changes they suggested. Now it should be noted, they were just focussing on the value of conferences to formation of policy and not the value to networking, training or dissemination of new information to attendees.

The monograph is fairly long (106 pages, double spaced) and begins with exploring the elements and influences that contribute to policy formation in other arenas like government. Anyone with a general knowledge of the political process won’t be surprised to learn that government policy is often created outside of formal meetings. Likewise, special commissions formed to address a problem are susceptible to shape their findings by political pressure and there is no guarantee that the person/body which formed the panel will actually heed its advice.

They do cite evidence (also not terribly surprising) that face to face meetings are more effective to policy development than just sending written reports to the same people. However, the meetings/interactions have to be on going rather than just one time seminars or conferences in order to build trust and looking relationships between the members. There seems to be less trust in what one hears at this one time events.

The monograph points out a number of impediments to the formation of cultural policy

In the arts, not only is visibility low, but there are also few “focusing events” or crises that demand a policy response. Second, there are few existing indicators,
especially ones that can be counted, that point to potentially serious and urgent problems facing the cultural sector. Sectors like housing, for example, rely on indicators such as new home purchases, rates of home ownership, the number of abandoned properties, and the number of homeless; transportation has statistics on highway fatalities, airline safety, U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and the capacity of public transit systems. In health care there are indicators for the number of uninsured citizens, per capita health expenditures, infant mortality, and the spread of infectious disease, among others. The cultural sector lacks these indicators, especially at the national level. Third, compared to other domains, there are few well-organized stakeholders in the cultural sector that exert consistent pressure on the political stream. Fourth, the cultural sector lacks a major public agency or department, where resources and decision making authority is centralized and where policy activity coalesces. Finally, the cultural policy community is highly fragmented with little agreement on common policy problems or concerns.

Part of the reason why conventions are such poor venues for forming cultural policy is that this is rarely the purpose of the gathering or it is poorly organized if it is.

However, a scan of the field indicates that, compared to other policy domains, strategic policy- focused convenings (task forces, commissions, and study groups) are not a regular part of the arts and culture landscape and remain underutilized policy tools. There are exceptions, some of which we will discuss below. Nevertheless, we argue, that those meetings that are organized around cultural policy issues tend to fall short of many of the criteria important for altering the public agenda or influencing decision makers. Arts meetings usually produce reports with vague and general recommendations that have little direct connection to specific policy actors; they often discuss broad issues, but fail to define clearly problems that have immediate and recognizable sequences.

They typically over represent the arts community and fail to engage effectively other policy areas and leaders from other sectors (they fall into the trap of “preaching to the choir”). Tepper and Hinton 31 Arts meetings rarely take into account the political opportunity structure, nor do they include a political strategy to move findings or recommendations into action. Dissemination and follow- up is often weak and special convenings and commissions in the arts tend to call for additional resources and new programs (“wish lists”) rather than
examine how existing programs and resources might be improved (administrative reform). Finally, these convenings rarely collect new data, nor do they involve a systematic and rigorous investigation of an issue.

In policy making, the paper identifies 10 steps that must be mounted to create good policy: Trends, Strategic Thinking, Concerns and Problem Identification, Policy Alternatives, Windows of Opportunity, Policy Barriers, Consensus Building; Selecting a Solution; Setting Priorities, Action Plan – Assigning Responsibility, Policy Enactment, Policy Implementation, Evaluation and re-design.

The study the authors conducted found most conference participants (73%) focused on the first three steps and very few (27%) focused on any steps beyond that. The authors point out that while this may make it appear that the arts are a “culture of complaint and not activism,” most conference enviroments are not designed in a way to facilitate a transition from broad to specific thinking.

A reason why conferences may not be designed to aid in effective policy formation is perceptual. The authors found that people had a “top down” view of policy making beliving that government, national organizations and foundation program officers were responsible for policy formation.

There is also a perception that the big cultural organizations set policy and that studies of cultural institutions only examine and discuss the needs of the large players. The smaller ones feel they have no choice but to follow in their wake if they are to survive because others are setting the standard for what is to be presented and funded. Conferences are seen as a good place to pick up short term strategies and best practices, but not as a forum for long term policy development.

Another obstruction to creation of policy is who is being invited to the conferences:

“[T]he vast majority of all speakers and panelists represent nonprofit organizations and that most of these are from arts-based nonprofits (both presenting and non-presenting organizations)…In fact, government representatives are visibly absent from the programs of the major
presenting arts associations…From our perspective it appears that, associations look to their own backyards when searching for speakers and panelists. In addition, if we look at trends over time (table 8), we find a decrease in the number of representatives from government and in the number of non-arts
related nonprofit speakers…In spite of the frequent rhetoric by cultural
leaders of imploring arts advocates to build bridges and make connections to other sectors and fields, it appears that, at least in terms speakers at the large annual meetings, we are increasingly drawing from within rather than from outside the arts.”

Tomorrow I hope to discuss the solutions the monograph suggests for more effective policy creation.