Policy Department B: Structural and Cohesion Policies
___________________________________________________________________________________________ Other reports go into more detail to trace the origins of these parallel initiatives, indicating that the American continent was in fact working on such a framework since 1997, as was the case with the Arabic Capital of Culture: the Organisation of American States, including all 35 countries on the American continent, adopted the European idea by initiating an annual event called the American Capital of Culture in 1997. Though, there are some difficulties in pushing through the initiative. For example, the cities of Austin/US (2004), Saskatchewan/Canada (2005) and Toronto/Canada (2002) were offered the honour, only to decline it when they discovered the financial and personnel commitments the award implied. In Russia, the federal district of the Volga decided in 2001 to set up an event based on the EU concept (MKW GmbH, 2007: 14). These programmes are not mentioned as a direct reference point by ECoC hosts, but some of the available evaluation reports refer to these parallel host cities and try to indicate emerging trends as a point of comparison. Palmer et al. (2012) make a point of listing all recent, current and upcoming hosts, and note that, in some countries, cities look into the full range of possible events available to them in a given period of time to plan a continuous bidding strategy. During the study’s second expert workshop in Brussels, however, stakeholders noted that these parallel Capitals of Culture programmes are far too diverse and not strictly comparable (ICC Workshop II, June 2013). Their vision, programming approaches and funding commitments are not fully consistent over time, and they are not backed by international agencies comparable within other continents to the European Commission. As such, they must be looked at with caution. So far, it has not been possible to identify specific evidence that their approaches to policy, delivery and evaluation are in any way a point of reference worth replicating by ECoC cities. Other initiatives that have been relevant to ECoC host cities and organisers involve collaborations between European networks and networks in other continents. Two such examples are the EU-Japan Festival and the China-Japan-South Korea initiative, which were highlighted by participants in the study’s first expert workshop (ICC Workshop I, April 2013). Additionally, a recent initiative, the World Design Capital launched by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design in 2008, is also seen as an interesting counterpoint, which offers an interesting point of reference in its approach to candidature selection, vision and programming frameworks.70 Out of all major events in current development, the Olympic Games can be considered the event that has developed the most sophisticated framework for its staging, branding, legacy planning and long-term evaluation; and this should be considered a serious point of reference for ECoC cities. Other mega-events, from the Universal Expo to the World Cup, are either far behind the Olympic Games in terms of knowledge transfer strategies, or do not include sufficient cultural-led agendas to make the comparison relevant to the ECoC. In the case of the Olympic Games, the event incorporates a large, official cultural programme with a similar rationale to the ECoC, the so-called Cultural Olympiad, which has been mentioned by some authors – including Palmer/Rae Associates (2004a), Garcia (2004b; 2004c) and Gold and Gold (2005) – as a relevant reference for ECoC hosts. For the purposes of this study, the aspect that is particularly worth considering and, potentially, adapting to the ECoC framework is the Olympic Games approach to evaluation and knowledge transfer – an exercise that has been in development since 2000, and has resulted in a detailed indicator framework and data collection requirements that host cities must adhere to as part of their host city contract. The most important aspect of this exercise is the requirement to collate certain data following a consistent pattern, so that different host cities can be compared against each other and over time. There is a degree of flexibility to allow for national and other contextual differences, but also a clear 70
See: http://www.worlddesigncapital.com/.
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