Cultural Observatories

Although cultural observatories—entities that collect and monitor information on culture—are largely national and regional, there are also some efforts to develop global cultural observatories. An observatory, in the primary sense of the word, is a body that observes, measures, and monitors various categories of phenomena, for example, the stars or weather conditions (hence, astronomical or meteorological observatories). These functions were first envisaged in the late 1980s for the cultural field by a French thinker-bureaucrat, Augustin Girard, who was instrumental in the establishment of the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles at Grenoble, France. His choice of term was deliberate: He wanted to indicate that the new institution was being created not to rule or control but simply to provide information to policymakers. In Girard's words, as quoted by J. Mark Schuster, “We cannot agree on a Center, but we can have an Observatory. It is a pleasant name. An Observatory is a place of negotiation, of interactivity. It does not deliver judgments” (Schuster, 2002, p. 33). The feedback function inherent in the notion, when transferred to human or social endeavor, implies not just informing the wider society about the field but advancing the field itself in its self-understanding, self-correction, and development.

The need for the functions identified by Girard was soon recognized across the cultural policy landscape and acted on steadily at the local, national, and regional levels. By the time Schuster reviewed the Euro-American research and information infrastructure for cultural policy in his pioneering 2002 volume Informing Cultural Policy, some 20 “cultural observatories” could be listed, plus at least an equal number of other entities performing observatory-type functions. These other models included the research divisions of governmental cultural funding agencies (the archetype here being French as well, the Ministry of Culture's Département des études, de la prospective et des statistiques); national statistics agencies; independent nonprofit research institutes; as well as government-designated, university-based research centers and consulting firms. By 2007, when Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthi Raj Isar also briefly mapped this expanding infrastructure, several more actual observatories had come into being; and since then, the pace of establishment of observatories has accelerated still further.

Regionalization has been a key feature. As cultural flows and processes transcend the boundaries of nation-states, the collection, processing, and dissemination of cultural information needs to be organized transnationally. The rationale for such border-crossing mechanisms of knowledge management in the cultural arena echoes as well as complements a range of compelling reasons cited at the national level. These include helping the cultural sector to move from the marginal place it still occupies in the public policy landscape and affirm its own “unity in diversity”; to break down the specialized “silos” that persist within the field; to reimagine itself as a community that operates both within and beyond national boundaries; to buttress the case for culture as a central dimension of development and governance, leading public authorities, civil society, and the corporate sector alike to facilitate cultural policies that match economic and social policies in effort and resources; to build robust connections between culture on the one hand and economics, politics, and social welfare on the other, and itself take the lead in forging strategies to develop such connections; and finally, to forge better links among cultural research (whether purely academic or more action-oriented in nature), cultural policy, and cultural practice.

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