Creativity 4 Sustainability: Trusting artists is key

Considering cultural projects that address sustainability, the cultural organisers on the panel had these messages for policymakers and funders:

1. Understand how organisations see funders’ role – “What I’m expecting from politics is to be like my parents: give financial security, support in need, liberty to think and develop the tools, and to evaluate the results together with me” (Matthieu Gillieron).
2. Trust – when funders trust a project’s aims and support it to establish its own criteria, measurements and tools to evolve, the results are typically better.
3. Put an end to hyperproduction – resist the urge to demand more productions, tour more, present more. Step back from hyperproduction and policies that support it and look at the scale, budgets and methods of production in the arts.
4. Data for decision making – Synergistic collaborations and alliances between policymakers, decision-makers, funding bodies, cultural organisations and research institutions can lead to effective data that can inform sustainable decisions.
5. Take a positive approach – Organisations want to be challenged, trusted, funded rather than threatened and measured. When policymakers go from doing almost nothing about sustainability to measuring, restricting and enforcing, it has a negative effect.
6. Consider the context (local, regional, national …) – external requirements should not be enforced in a context not suitable for achieving them. “There’s a paradox – despite the urgency of the issues, some measures shouldn’t be rushed” (Vânia Rodrigues).
7. Aim for substantial, long-term results – Many organisations are interested in doing initiatives and experiments, but they also want something more substantial, that produces long-term results.
8. Scale up – “It’s time to move beyond funding just initiatives, pilot programmes, laboratories that only test ideas and never go further to be fine-tuned, upgraded or scaled up after the test phase is over. Now is the time to evaluate them and make them policy” (Zala Velkavrh).
9. Look beyond the environment – We shouldn’t forget two important questions that often don’t get asked: What about climate justice? and Sustainability for whom?

When asked if freedom should be hindered, if arts should be forced to align with funders’ greater agendas, and if arts policy should even adapt specific policies around climate change, more takeaways emerged:

1. Free-thinking over content limitations – Funding bodies should leave room for free-thinking and not impose too many content limitations on the projects they fund; artists are anyway dealing with these issues.
2. Support various formats – Yes! to supporting experimentation, innovation and research …
3. Simplify reporting — No! to over-bureaucratic, micromanagement reporting procedures that produce meaningless statistics and piles of photocopied invoices.
4. Spend more time evaluating the meaningful aspects – Despite priorities for social impact and environmental impact, panellists remarked there’s little dialogue or time spent evaluating the projects on these levels and implementing the results more thoroughly.
5. Recalculate the numbers – Consider the potential long-term impact of funding many projects with a little money or short timeframe rather than fewer projects with more money or longer timeframes.
6. Create flexible schemes – Organisations need time for growth inside a project and for new opportunities to arise within it, to be able to respond to developments and the current situation.
7. Invest in projects with long-term value – Funders should not just be concerned about the immediate deliverables. “It’s better to support the things surrounding the project that can lead to a long-term impact.”
8. Systemic problems require a systemic approach – Artists and cultural managers shouldn’t be held responsible for solving systemic issues that fall beyond their purview although they should also sit on the committees for solving them.
9. Cross-sector and inter-ministerial cooperation is key – The discussion with the forum audience confirmed that “Policymakers shouldn’t stay in their silos”. All ministries should have on their staff someone concerned with culture AND someone concerned with sustainability.

Are policymakers and funders ready to take the lead and risk differently?