Situating the local in global cultural policy

Epistemic governance and partnerships in place

“…culture before the pandemic GM has a history of collaborative working across its towns, cities and districts, which paved the way to city-regional devolution. The strength of the relationships within this 'red wall stronghold' of mainly left-wing-led local governments working to create the first combined authority in England has raised the city-region's profile and identity, and has benefitted the strategic negotiation of capital investment related to the Northern Powerhouse, an initiative aimed to rebalance geographic inequalities in productivity and support economic development across the north of England (Gilmore and Bulaitis, 2023). This initiative, choreographed by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and combined with a long-standing advocacy for culture and creative industries, provided visibility for the city-region within Westminster which resulted in £78m of central government investment in The Factory, a new home for Manchester International Festival (MIF), among other component parts of the 2014 devolution deal (Jenkins, 2015).…”

“…The GM Culture Fund was led not only by the principle of economic redistribution, but also by the conviction that a healthy cultural ecosystem should transcend the values held by a small number of flagship institutions. Along with region-wide schemes like Great Place GM (2018-2021), a joint funding scheme by Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund which aimed to capacity build cultural place-making, there have been significant efforts to formalise strategic relationships between culture and substantive outcomes in other policy areas within GM, from municipal cultural strategies to the local industrial strategy for GM, which foregrounded cultural venues and creative industries clusters as economic drivers (Gilmore and Bulaitis, 2023). As a local government officer explained of their district's plans for culture prior to the pandemic: 'it was all about trying to establish a cultural ecology across the borough and to engage stakeholders in what that cultural ecology blueprint could and should look like'.…”