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Thirdly, the significant impacts the arts make would be quantified in terms of societal welfare, our suggested key currency for the wider cultural sector, enabling us to show both value for money, and the relative value between the things we achieve. This framework should be accompanied by a forum for learning and a shift towards co-production. Clearly it needs the buy-in of a coalition of partners, in and outside the sector.
3.1 Making culture work To ensure the ROCI framework works broadly across the sector, we hope to establish a programme of action and academic research to develop the ideas. Our action-researchers will be working on what we think creates value at each point, what we do in our cultural activity and what outcomes we think it creates. Our academic research will explore the links, showing causality to evidence our judgments. This programme is not a funded project nor a policy-driven initiative. It is an invitation to cultural practitioners and others to pool their thinking to create something that works nationally. In the next section, Daniel outlines how leading edge thinking in economics is supportive of this approach, and can provide the tools to make it happen. We cultural specialists share with the economists an interest in learning what works and valuing impact, but we have a stronger view of the need to empower participants. We both believe that not only should the ultimate goal be welfare (as you’ll see below), but the way we reach that goal should contribute to welfare.
Section Two – Thinking about the value of culture – An economist’s perspective Daniel Fujiwara, London School of Economics Economists have a long history of researching and doing evaluation – it’s part and parcel of the discipline. So what do we need to understand about economics, evaluation and measurement if we are to make progress in the way Mandy describes in the previous section? The most important message of this section is that there is room for a lot of improvement in the way we evaluate the arts and culture, but on a positive note that the tools are available for us to do so in a robust way – both in terms of how we assess the causal impact of cultural activity and value that impact. If we want to make culture work, in Mandy’s terms, then we have to make evaluation and measurement work more precisely and cleverly.
Introduction Let’s start by making a definition. We can think of economics in two ways. First there is economics as outputs and indicators, which are measures such as GDP or economic growth rates. Second, there is economics as a science, which is a much broader phenomenon about the theory and technical methods that underlie economics and the tools that economists rely on to do their research. The former is often how economics is portrayed in the