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Reported by Kate McNeil, CSaP Communications Coordinator
As part of CSaP’s ongoing lunchtime seminar series on resilience, in December 2020 policy fellows heard from Nesta’s Eliza Easton, who led a discussion on how the concept of resilience has been used in policies for the creative economy. Nesta was originally conceived by government to work on innovation, and the creative economy is one of the organisation’s core missions. Work for the organisation can involve work on areas including art, film, fashion design and technology, but can also involve working with data scientists, and collaborating with policymakers and academics on areas such as industrial strategy.
For Ms Easton, her work in on the creative economy started with work on austerity and an approach to the publicly funded arts. Over the past decade, there have been significant drops in spending in this area, alongside the emergence of a language of resilience. This language of resilience has emerged as policymakers called for cultural organisations to develop new funding models and has been described by Ms Easton as linked to risk mitigation alongside reduced local and central government funding for the creative sector. Organisations were encouraged to ‘build resilience’ and ‘ensure future sustainability’ in the context of challenging budgets while focusing on commercial opportunities and diversification of revenue streams for the arts sector and museums.
Thousands of jobs have been lost in the arts sector since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, and this has occurred alongside recent rises in zero-hour contracts, and reliance on freelancers. Ms Easton has suggested that organisations which focused on exploring resilience primarily through the development of commercial opportunities were among the worst hit by the covid-19 pandemic, as many had become more reliant on audiences and commercial funding which have not been available during this period. Meanwhile, other organisations which focused on a broader range of risks to the arts sector while shuffling revenue streams were often more resilient during this period. Consequently, Ms Easton has asked whether the language of resilience in this sector has helped or harmed over the past year, while also highlighting the need for the arts sector to explore what it might learn in future from a more holistic understanding of resilience.
Ms Easton stressed the need for the sector to better understand its primary purpose, to be able to make swift decisions to protect their primary focus during future times of crisis. Here, Ms Easton also noted that she believes that one of the strengths in the arts sector response throughout the pandemic came from having a strong chain of command and central institution, namely the Arts Councils, through which support could be provided and coordination could occur.
Ultimately, Ms Easton suggested that we need to ensure that the language of resilience does not result in organisations overly focusing on one specific risk, and that if we focus on the ability to weather one type of problem rather than the ability to weather a wide variety of unexpected shocks, we can end up masking the broader vulnerability of an area of the economy.