Situating the local in global cultural policy

Abstract

From the growth of city regions to the calls for more localism, engaging with ‘the local’ has become an increasingly important part of cultural policy rhetoric in many countries (UNESCO, 2013; UCLG, 2019). Yet despite apparent recognition that the practices of culture are always situated (and hence local), contemporary cultural policy research tends to privilege the national or international as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted and thus, can be reformed (Durrer, et al., 2018). For all of its increasing use ‘the local’ remains abstract, seemingly deployed to legitimate activity that is of debatable benefit to the places and practices imagined by its invocation.