International Conference

Policy & Politics

'Policy and Politics in a Globalising World'

University of Bristol

24-26 July 2003

Stream 'Democracy and Participation'

Auditing Culture: the subsidized cultural sector in the

New Public Management

This paper explores the effects of the spread of the principles and practices of the New Public Management (NPM) on the subsidized cultural sector and on cultural policy-making in Britain. In particular, the changes in the style of public administration that can be ascribed to the NPM will be shown to provide a useful framework to make sense of what has been felt as an 'instrumental turn' in British policies for culture between the early 1980s and the present day.

The current New Labour government, as well as the arm length's bodies that distribute public funds for the cultural sector in Britain, are indeed showing an increasing tendency to justify public spending on the arts on the basis of instrumental notions of the arts and culture. In the context of what have been defined as 'instrumental cultural policies', the arts are subsidised in so far as they represent a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In this perspective, the emphasis placed on the potential of the arts to help tackle social exclusion and the role of the cultural sector in place marketing and local economic development are typical examples of the current trends in British cultural policy-making. The central argument purported by this paper is that this instrumental emphasis in British cultural policy is closely linked to the changes in the style of public administration that have given rise to the NPM. These new developments have indeed put the publicly funded cultural sector under increasing pressure. In particular, it will be shown how the new stress on the measurement of the arts' impacts in clear and quantifiable ways - which characterizes today's 'audit society' - has proved a tough challenge for the sector and one has not been successfully met.

The paper will conclude by critically considering how the spread of the NPM has affected processes of policy-making for the cultural sector, and the damaging effects that such developments may ultimately have on the arts themselves.