curious patterns #18
Too little culture in international development cooperation, too many dilemmas in fair international collaboration, and the beauty of speculative flash fiction.
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Just like most of you, I suppose, I have been in a state of delirious doomscrolling for the past weeks, my mind oscillating between resignation to the bigger, violent forces of this world and being absolutely amped to double my efforts to use my place in culture and cooperation to contribute to a better future for us all ✊
Welcome, mighty new subscribers at AEA Consulting 🇺🇸🇬🇧, The Green Room 🇫🇷, Hochschulrektorenkonferenz 🇩🇪, and Heartefact Fund 🇷🇸.
🇺🇦 The unthinkable has happened, and yet again we remain somewhat helpless bystanders. The Director of the Ukrainian Institute has some poignant thoughts about how one-dimensionally we often think of this country, and what culture can do to tell the many stories of modern Ukraine.
One of those people introducing this diverse Ukraine to me has always been my mate Ivan, who still is in the country now. He has taken to providing a deeply human view into his and his family’s life through his Facebook videos, including one in which he is trolling his Australian mates for the great toilet paper shortage when Kyiv supermarkets evidently had an ample supply of such even in war times. I know you might be reading this - stay strong, mate!
Another deeply human view into the current state of Ukraine is writer Yevgenia Belorusets’ war diary. It’s poetic and disturbing in equal measure.
🇲🇿🇵🇬 For participatory cultural policymaking, consultations are a good first step, if not yet the ideal state. Onwards and upwards, Mozambique and Papua New Guinea!
🇮🇳 The kids are ok. They’re just developing music therapy apps for fellow children with varying mental abilities, entirely based on research, with teacher training built-in.
🇲🇽 Mexico top: Collecting culture data with both social and economic indicators.
🇲🇽 Mexico flop: Forgetting about the creators in new cultural appropriation law.
🇰🇪 Internet service providers and creatives are not on good terms in Kenya. Why? Musicians face a major loss of income due to piracy while ISPs profit from it.
⛓ DAOs are decentralised autonomous organisations that run in the web3 ecosystem. Now, the first philanthropy experiments are popping up. Excited?
🌏 Southeast Asia top: Shifting production and consumption to sustainable fashion.
🌏 Southeast Asia flop: Impeding film industry through language, funding, censorship.
🇸🇾 A tale of the global film community protecting filmmakers at risk, the power of documentary film and citizen journalism, and how philantrophic money can help.
🎓 When you allow scholars from the Global South to be Principal Investigators you get excellent research - duh! Glad for this reflection so funding can be democratised.
‘Today’s creativity is tomorrow’s heritage’
What a poetic sentence tucked away in one of the last paragraphs of the introduction of Re|shaping policies for creativity: addressing culture as a global public good, UNESCO’s flagship 2005 Convention monitoring publication, isn’t it? Living in a country that has seen its fair share of weaponising heritage preservation vis-à-vis contemporary cultural expressions, I think this is a beautiful lens to take.
First and foremost I would like to blame the delay of curious patterns #18 on this very report. I mean, 331 pages chock-full of fascinating monitoring data and narrative context, really? Full disclosure, I still have not been able to read it back to front, but it is so incredibly rich that I already see myself coming back to it many times over the next couple of months. For now, I have only picked some of the development and evaluation cherries 🍒
So, before I go any further, make sure to download the report NOW:
Let’s get this party started, shall we? Yarri Kamara’s article on Goal 3, Integrate Culture in Sustainable Development Frameworks, is preceded by this piece of insight:
Official Development Assistance for culture remains dramatically low
It’s 0.23% dramatically low to be precise – and that was pre-COVID. I might sound like a broken record, but seeing how much money is wasted in other areas of ODA (I have opinions!), this just breaks my heart. Good on Switzerland, Sweden, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and France for formally integrating culture into their development coordination strategies. And, of course, the EU and other multi-laterals. But there is still SO MUCH potential!
Luckily, governments do recognise the cultural and creative industries’ role in achieving cultural and social outcomes, to a lesser but still significant extent also economic outcomes (curious, huh?). What’s missing is the environmental angle. That begs the question whether we as a sector do too little climate change mitigation ourselves to be considered relevant for achieving wider positive environmental outcomes through culture and creativity. I guess it’s too easy to forget to watch your quadruple bottom line if you consider yourself part of the solution.
Applying the climate justice lens in light of disappearing cultural diversity is also a toughie. Those that did the least to contribute to the ensuing climate crisis and the gradual disappearance of their cultural diversity are the ones most affected by it. All the while, the Global North with its resources can maintain the status quo or put adaptation measures in place. Karima Bennoune calls it climate culture apartheid 💥
Streaming – that one thing that kept many of us culturally alive throughout the pandemic – is also a major but still much understudied contributor to global energy consumption. Something to think about for our new normal, don’t you think?
Another focus of Yarri’s analysis is on evaluation to avoid pitfalls and replicate good practices. Her recommendation is music to my ears:
Parties should further invest in evaluating sustainable development plans and programmes and strengthen their evaluation capacities, notably through dedicated international cooperation programmes in developing countries and the creation of a clearing house for cultural development evaluation reports to enhance use of existing knowledge.
Boy, am I here for such a central space for all cultural development evaluation reports to be stored, indexed, coded and made available. Think of all the lessons we could learn 😍 If anyone of you, dear readers, gets something like this started, please give me a call. This would also line up so well with other authors’ calls for more, better and comparable cultural information systems globally, especially if they are open and shared with civil society to participate in.
In other news:
🔎 Culture increasingly appears in national development frameworks but receives too little attention in international development cooperation.
↔️↕️ Arts and culture would benefit from more horizontal (inter-ministerial huddles) as well as vertical (make that money trickle down!) integration in governments.
⚖️ There are still big issues with human rights / fundamental freedoms and social protection for cultural workers globally.
📢 Civil society participation in cultural policy making is most common on national level but actually more impactful on subnational level (and we all know, civil society participation is a unique feature of the 2005 Convention).
♿️ On top of that, subnational actors are often better positioned to provide access to culture but rarely have access to the funds needed.
🤝 Aid for Trade and preferential treatment mechanisms are heavily under-utilised for cultural goods and services from developing countries.
🤬 We still suck at enabling gender equality, and we increasingly suck at protecting artistic freedom globally (despite all the laws). Ugh.
💸 And public funding is still an issue across the board – no surprises there.
Also, how have I not heard of Indonesia’s Cultural Development Index that supposedly measures the performance of culture against sustainable development before? Will be right back… 💨
IMPACT
🏛 You know I’m a sucker for good presentation. Whether we’re talking research results, evaluation insights or anything really, UX is key. And the latest issue of the UK NatCom for UNESCO’s Heritage and Our Sustainable Future is pretty neat, I must say. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s about Evaluating the Impact of Cultural Heritage for Sustainable Development. Count me in! On the findings front of this research x consultation situation, there are no surprises, though: the Sustainable Development Goals and the monitoring indicators they come with do not recognise cultural heritage in its breadth and depth, leaving much of its various impact areas unaccounted. What’s needed? Well, a better integration, more relevant indicators, and better suited evaluation methods – easy, right?
🌆 You like the idea of using data but don’t know how? If you work with/for/in cities, I’ve got good news for you. Firstly, the World Cities Culture Forum has released a nice little booklet with twelve case studies how cities made data work for their own evidence-based cultural policy making. Secondly, Bloomberg Associates put together some good data and surveying practices for municipal grantmaking. All pretty Western, but the messages are clear: know what you want before you start collecting gazillions of gigabytes of stuff you will never look at again. Helps you, helps your cultural actors. Of course, there might be some more insights in there, too 😉
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🚫🧰 Ok, so apparently this is not a toolkit. Not in the sense of implementation aides anyway. But it very much is a toolkit in that it gives cultural relations actors a bunch of tools to reflAct on what fair collaboration could look like: a card game, a fairness checker, a critical glossary, you name it. Even though I am not directly in the target group and neither have used the material in the way it’s intended, I had a good time reading through this EUNIC resource. My favourite element is the cultural relations Dilemma Cards – many of the scenarios will sound all too familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Bonus points for including some thoughts on fair evaluation and publishing everything under Creative Commons.
✅🧰 However, there is an alternative. Or: tialt. Genius name for a company, I must admit. And the good people at tialt have developed a toolkit and call it that, too. While they work a lot in culture, these three methods are broad enough for anyone doing honest research with people. There is a card game to explore different notions of love and care, a really cool approach to collaborative experience mapping, and the incredibly simple but equally intriguing idea of a walking interview. I will definitely try out the walking interview in the future. And I might get to experiment with the experience mapping in a collaborative format very soon, too. Great stuff!
✨ You’ve made it up to here - nice! Perhaps you’d like to subscribe and get this newsletter right to your email inbox every month? 👇
LIMINAL SPACE
🗞 ‘We’ creates empathy. And in times like these, empathy and solidarity are what keep us going. That’s one of the reasons why I adore Sham Jaff’s what happened last week newsletter. All headlines are written in the first person plural to make you an active part of world news, not just a bystander. Another reason why this newsletter is absolutely subscribe-worthy? Sham’s self-described no-bullshit journalism features news from a bunch of countries too often forgotten. And, just like curious patterns, whlw: also comes with its own awesome Spotify playlist, Decolonize Weekly. Subscribe now, thank me later.
⚡️ Flash fiction is my new favourite literature genre. How did I come across it? At New Naratif, my friendly neighbourhood democracy-driven Southeast Asian media outlet. They always do great reporting, but this recent series of climate flash fiction is nothing short of mesmerising. Four stories, all superbly illustrated, envision scenarios of the future deeply impacted by climate change. Take some time to learn more about life outside the Fishbowl and on the Flipside, read the last wishes of the last indigenous elder, and pray for the new generation of boat people.
🇨🇳 Putting the ‘industry’ in creative industries. 99% Invisible (or 99pi) is my go-to podcast for my weekly run around the block. It’s rich on research and covers all the obscure, fascinating or simply overlooked little stories around design in the widest sense possible. And the recent episode Art Imitates Art did not disappoint. It tells the story of Dafen, an original village incorporated into Shenzhen, and how it become THE place for oil paintings in the world. I’m not gonna spoil it any further – it’s a light and funny podcast episode of 41 minutes that I am sure you culture folks will enjoy.
💡 Did you know?
… that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has culture’s role for sustainable development written in its Strategic Plan for Culture and Arts 2016-2025?
Encourage ASEAN-level cooperation to promote the link between culture and inclusive social development, poverty reduction and sustainable development
Encourage AMS [ASEAN Member States] and sectoral bodies to prioritise culture as a pillar of sustainable development
OPPORTUNITIES
27 April: Report on cultural rights and sustainable development (call for inputs)
📨 The UN’s new Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki picked a mighty topic for her first big thematic report: cultural rights and sustainable development. So if you’ve got some thoughts on what “development” should aspire to and what consideration has been given to their cultural dimensions and to cultural rights, this call is for you. You can email in your contributions, and your concerns might be heard by the UN General Assembly.
15 May: South-South Arts Fellowships (call for applications)
🔥 This new programme to facilitate more cultural mobility and genuine exchange within the Global South is fire. Designed to address local challenges, it welcomes artists, cultural workers and collectives from Africa, Asia and the Pacific at this point. And look at that absolute all-star unit behind the fellowship! Applications open now.
15 June: International Fund for Cultural Diversity (call for applications)
💰 For those of you that have undertaken a recent social media detox, been too overwhelmed by S:2020 E:3, or simply live under a rock, don’t miss the application deadline for this year’s IFCD. Up to 100k are waiting for you.
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com