Professor Gayle McPherson

1
School of Creative Cultural Industries

• Professor Gayle McPherson
• Chair in Events and Cultural Policy

2
The Co-Creation of Public Policy the use of
mega-events to add cultural value

• This research is a work in progress and comes
  from my interest in culture and events.
• Globally events have become a fundamental policy
  conduit that develops in two main ways (a)
  events in policy making (b) events as policy
• In aiming at securing (b) politicians, event
  owners, and cultural providers have had to use
  culture and value initially as a post-hoc
  justification but now as a key leveraging tool.

3
Co-creating policy

• Roche (2000) talked of mega-events as expressions
  of public culture in the nineteenth century.
• Leadership for the common good (Bryson and
  Crosby, 2010). Weve moved to supranational
  values emulated by bodies such as the IOC.
• With community benefits clauses, legacy, impact
  and outcomes all buzz words of hosting a major
  event it is easy to see why the role of culture
  is debated heavily in economic and cultural
  domains.

• The London 2012 Games has given policy makers the
  chance to go beyond the narrow confines of return
  on investment models
• Leveraging value in communities, engaging and
  enhancing Britains cultural infrastructure and
  promoting the UK internationally has been a key
  responsibility of the cultural ambassadors,
  politicians, and others at the London 2012 Games.
• Models of policy appraisal?

4
Models of policy appraisal

• The selection of key indicators for monitoring
  and evaluation over others is often used to
  legitimate policy makers and event owners
  proposals.
• Holdens 3 interdependent types of value
  instrumental, institutional and intrinsic
• The need to have shared global leadership who
  really owns these events?

• Whose interests are being represented?
• Others have talked of multi-criteria analysis but
  how about we look at this in reverse.
• Is there such a way to co-create policy in
  advance of bidding for global events and adopt
  this approach to national and local events?
• All of this suggests long term planning and
  evaluation of the totality of benefits (a
  holistic approach) not that hard or incisive
  perhaps but then political leaders may not last
  beyond 4 year terms across the globe

5
Arguments for policy development

• monitoring and evaluation holds the key to policy
  development at a strategic level
• Need to move from snapshot of impacts to long
  term analysis of return on objectives not just
  RoI.
• Creating a culture of collaboration and
  partnership deepens practice, output and the
  chance for sustained engagement
• Whilst

• not ignoring the need for headline statistics of
  impact and spectacle of images around the world
• We need to capture cultural value through an
  understanding of elite decision making but also
• We need to ensure that we involve the people of
  communities as subjects not objects
• The multi-layered approach that will inform
  future policy

6
Circuits of Cultural Competition

• International competition also drives national
  and local political actors to resource events
  policy instead of other policy priorities
• The power of nomadic mega-events and the
  resources needed may intensify global division
  a hierarchy of nations
• As platforms of trans-national brands events have
  bargaining power but must take care to protect
  the core hyper-experiential novelty that makes
  them distinctive and spectacular
• And we as policy-makers, evaluators, influencers
  and academics must ensure we participate in the
  shared power world ensure the common good!