Making policies work

ECDPMEventsThe Ecology of Culture: Community Engagement, Co-Creation and Cross Fertilisation

Multimedia

External event

Conference

The Ecology of Culture: Community Engagement, Co-Creation and Cross Fertilisation

Start:

21 October 2015

End:

23 October 2015

23rd ENCATC Annual Conference

ENCATC is a European network on cultural management and cultural policy education. Academics, researchers, professionals from the cultural sector, policy makers, artists, students and media from Europe and beyond gathered for the 23rd ENCATC Annual Conference “The Ecology of Culture: Community Engagement, Co-creation, Cross Fertilisation” that was held from 21-23 October 2015 in Lecce, Italy.

“How does a cultural system work as a whole? What are the relationships and links between publicly funded, homemade and commercial culture? Seeing culture as ecology, rather than only an economy, is helpful to stimulate discussion on the multiple values culture creates, rather than focusing only on financial or social ones.

By applying ecological metaphors such as emergence, interdependence, networks, and convergence to culture, we can gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy formulation and implementation.” ENCATC 2015 conference website.

Creative processes are at the heart of development and culture is a cross-cutting dimension of sustainable development. This is the culture-development nexus. ECDPM has growing body of work on how culture and development interact and you can read more at our Dossier ‘Culture and international cooperation‘.

ECDPM’s Greta Galeazzi made a presentation “No sands castles – Earth architecture and peace caravans: Learning from the practice of culture, development and peace in Niger”. The presentation, based on a paper co-authored with Dr Damien Helly, looked at the rationale for multimedia research & storytelling and proposed a methodology to apply it to two culture & development projects by Comitato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo dei Popoli.

The potential added value and benefit of a multimedia approach (including storytelling) to understand the role of culture in, for, as development are:

A co-creation approach: trust-building, participation and exchange on the value of culture.
Producing context-specific and multidimensional data, avoiding generalisations.
The storage and reuse of data.
Better audience outreach and communication (synthesis, accessibility and impact).

No sands castles – Earth architecture and peace caravans: Learning from the practice of culture, development and peace in Niger