This edited collection calls for a greater understanding of ‘the local’ within the ways the arts, culture and creative practices are governed and promoted, regulated, resourced and valued. Cultural policy studies tends to marginalise the ‘local’, emphasising its value as a case study, rather than a topic of study in its own right. There is also privileging of the national (and international) as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted, and thus can be reformed. While this may make global policy transfer manageable for national policy agencies, there are contingent relationships between policy and ‘the local’ which inform practice, and which reflect diverse geographies with distinct identities. This volume interrogates our conceptualisations of ‘the local’ in cultural policy studies. The book is structured around three themes: disciplining the local, through examination of particular understandings of the key concepts from different academic fields of study; managing the local, through examination of policy approaches that engage with the idea of ‘the local’ in different ways; and practising the local, through case studies of how ‘local’ cultural policies are being enacted in places of differing scale and geography.This is an open access book.

This open access book examines how and why the UK's approach towards increasing cultural participation has largely failed to address inequality and inequity in the subsidised cultural sector despite long-standing international policy discourse on this issue. It further examines why meaningful change in cultural policy has not been more forthcoming in the face of this apparent failure. This work examines how a culture of mistrust, blame, and fear between policymakers, practitioners, and participants has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts mediocre quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success, and lacks meaningful critical reflection. It shows through extensive field work with cultural professionals and participants how the absence of criticality, transparency, and honesty limits the potential for policy learning, which the authors argue is a precondition to any radical policy change and is necessary for developing a greater understanding of the social construction of policy problems. The book presents a new framework that encourages more open and honest conversations about failure in the cultural sector to support learning strategies that can help avoid these failures in the future.