Factors influencing collaborative cultural governance. The case of cultural districts

The last decade has witnessed a global surge of political interest in partnerships and networks in the cultural sector, as means to mobilize power and resources and implement broad societal and economic goals (e.g., European Commission, 2010; 2013; European Parliament, 2011; 2012; UNESCO, 2005). At the local level, it has been stressed that networks and collaborations play a role not only in cultural policy implementation, but also in policy formulation, requiring significant adjustment of local planning and administration structures and processes. As a result, there has been a notable shift towards collaborative forms of local cultural governance, characterized by shared power among the public, private and societal actors in both decision-making and implementation processes. Despite the growing relevance of collaborative cultural governance in the forms of cultural networks and partnerships, the process for linking collaborative interventions and mechanisms to cultural policy outcomes in response to given contexts is little understood. A lingering commitment to input-output models of policy evaluation has attributed cultural governance outcomes to policy instruments, rather than accounting for the context and the mechanisms used to govern the implementation process. I argue that there is not necessarily a direct algorithmic relationship between policy intervention and outcome, but rather a contingent one, where outcomes can be critically dependent on context and on way the actors’ interaction is governed in networks and partnerships. To address this problem and respond to the growing relevance of culture-driven collaborations to local planners and cultural administrators, the aim of this dissertation is to explore how these collaborations are governed. The concept of ‘collaborative cultural governance’ is employed as a flexible, overarching term to designate shared decision making and implementation among public, private and societal actors in cultural policy implementation. A first objective is to identify context, intervention, and mechanism factors that shape the process of collaborative governance. A second objective is to investigate the relationships between these context, intervention, and mechanism factors and cultural policy outcomes. Consequently, the study is asking the following questions: 1. What are the factors that influence collaborative cultural governance? 2. How are specific interventions and mechanisms used to secure specific outcomes in given context of collaborative cultural governance? The research draws on three pertinent clusters of literature: collaborative governance studies, cultural policy and planning, and cultural district and creative cluster studies, to develop a contingency framework of collaborative cultural governance based on a Context-Intervention-Mechanism-Outcomes (CIMO) logic (Van Aken, 2007). CIMO-logic organizes knowledge prescriptively, according to the following flow: in this class of problematic Contexts this type of Intervention will produce these Outcomes through these generative Mechanisms. The reason to employ this approach is based on the research objective, which aimed to investigate how collaborative cultural governance leads to specific cultural policy outcomes. Neither collaborative governance literature nor cultural policy literature could provide an answer to this question separately; in order to bring them together CIMO-logic provided a simple, useful structure. This approach can also help clarify inconsistencies in previous research that identified conflicting relationships between interventions and outcomes, by taking into consideration Context as a contingent factor. Drawing on principal Agent Theory and Network Theory, testable propositions are developed to guide the empirical investigation, which specify relationship among context factors (environmental turbulence, resource asymmetries, history of relationships), structural and process interventions, mechanisms (rational or relational), and outcomes (hard cultural infrastructure, soft cultural infrastructure, or collaborative outcomes). This framework is used as a basis for a multiple case study methodology. Two case studies are selected based on theoretical sampling from among a series of Cultural Districts in Lombardy, Italy: CREARTE, the Cultural District of the Cremona Province, and DOMINUS, the Cultural District of Oltrepò Mantovano. Cultural Districts are representative for the phenomenon of collaborative cultural governance, as they are characterized by shared power between the public, private and societal actors in both decision-making and implementation processes. The selected case studies were implemented in the same Italian region by the same program, which allows for controlling part of the context factors and focusing the scope of the study. The research design employs qualitative methods of data collection, triangulating documentary sources and semi-structured interviews for each of the two case studies. Data is coded using qualitative methods that tested the theoretical factors and relations. Additionally, these methods allowed for emergent themes that fell out of the theoretical framework in order to provide additional explanation for the relationships investigated. The findings verified the factors that influence collaborative cultural governance identified in the conceptual framework, and led to a more nuanced view of the relations among them. It was found that governance interventions were related to the level of specificity entailed by the cultural policy outcome pursued. Thus, more specific outcomes such as hard infrastructures were pursued by collaboration design and management interventions that favored reduced structural complexity (meaning a less diverse and numerous composition of the network) and a more structured approach to process (deliberate planning, multilevel leadership, rigorous role assignments and rule specification). On the contrary, for soft infrastructure characterized by low task specificity and for collaborative outcomes, the governance interventions favored a higher number and diversity of participants, as well as less structured leadership and planning processes, flexible role assignment and rule specification. These interventions were enacted through both rational and relational mechanisms: it was found that an internal context characterized by resource asymmetries led to a preference for rational mechanisms (contracts, monitoring and evaluation, incentives, centralized coordination), while a history of cooperation among participants led to a preference for relational mechanisms (trust building, building shared understating of goals and norms through direct interactions and communication). Environmental turbulence (fragmentation and system instability) was found to be a prominent destabilizing factor for both rational and relational mechanisms, undermining coordination, shifting priorities (and therefore incentives), and altering trust and reciprocity. The contributions of this research are multifold. First, it examines a phenomenon that is increasingly represented in practice – collaborative cultural governance – yet it has not been systematically investigated in academic literature. Second, it brings together two separate clusters of scholarly knowledge – cultural policy and public administration - in order to develop new hypothesis pertaining to the relationship between cultural governance instruments mechanisms and outcomes. Third, although a range of collaborative governance interventions and mechanisms had been identified in public administration literature, their link to particular outcomes pursued by cultural policies had not been addressed, so it remained unclear how specific outcomes can be achieved. By empirically testing the relationship between governance mechanisms and cultural policy outcomes, this research contributes to resolving inconsistencies highlighted by prior studies. A limitation of this study is the reduced number of case studies. A more precise determination of the role context factors play in influencing network outcomes in response to different governance instruments and mechanisms calls for a synthesis across multiple context-specific studies. The framework used in this dissertation can be used for further research to refine the understanding of the factors that influence the outcomes of collaborative cultural governance.