Dr David O’Brien (now of City University) was the first fellow on the DCMS’s Measuring the Value of Culture programme. Thirteen months ago, his report on his research (also called Measuring the Value of Culture) was published. Here he reflects on the origins of the report and where he thinks the debate is going.
The Measuring the Value of Culture programme at the DCMS grew out of a range of trends and contexts. To name just a few:
- DCMS had recognised the need to make sure their decision-making process was clearer and more transparent and used evidence in a more effective way
- There was already a large scale programme underway to better understand evidence within the cultural sector (the CASE programme)
- Given the backdrop of ongoing financial crisis, there was a recognition that the process of comprehensive spending reviews would be difficult for the cultural sector without robust ways to make the case for cultural funding.
My work concentrated on a literature review on methods of measurement used across Whitehall. The main focus was using the Treasury's guidelines on policy appraisal and evaluation, the Green Book, to think about which methods would best fit those guidelines. I discovered there were valuable comparisons with transport, environment and health departments, which had all faced the same dilemmas and debates about how best to measure value within their respective policy areas. My research recommended that for central government's approaches to cultural policy it was most appropriate to use methods of measurement that were recognised by the Green Book. Primarily those methods are economic valuation techniques such as preference based and wellbeing based techniques, which help decision makers to price the costs and benefits of potential policies.
This is a controversial idea, particularly if you think culture is an area that defies measurement, one which should not be subject to the kind of processes that Treasury has tried to embed in other areas of Whitehall. Even using the phrase ‘economic valuation’ tends to cause suspicion, given the chequered history of the use of other forms of economics, particularly economic impact studies, by the cultural sector.
However, a year on from the report, I think that Measuring Cultural Value should be seen as an opportunity, rather than a threat to the cultural sector. As Phase Two of the project is asking - what other ways of valuing are there? What other measures would we like to see?
I think we’re at the start of what could be a vital debate that might go far beyond the cultural sector itself. We need to seriously discuss the nature, usefulness and limits of economic valuation and economics as a discipline. The cultural sector, with its stress on the possibilities offered by artistic and cultural experiences, can show us what a vision of the good society might look like. It might then show us how economics could fit into this vision. I hope the next year of the Measuring the Value of Culture programme will see dialogue between Whitehall’s measures and the cultural sector’s vision, dialogue which will benefit both the participants in the debate and, more widely, contemporary social life.
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