Exploring alternative ways of doing business and the economy in the Bristol and Bath creative sectors
Over the past year or so I have been working on a cross-cutting fellowship project for the B+B R+D programme, looking at alternative ways of doing business and the economy and what lessons we can learn to help make the South West creative sectors more fair, sustainable and values-led.
While other work in the B+B R+D programme is interested in developing creative practitioners, businesses and investors as agents of change, the central question for this research project is how wider economic and governance structures enable or inhibit attempts to think and do differently through the narratives and mechanisms that they create and support.
The broad goals of the research are:
To co-develop new narratives of regional growth alternatives in the creative sector and beyond with key governance partners in the region
Take a practice-based change perspective understanding organisations and groups as comprising of individuals with their own worldviews and ideas who act as agents of change
Identify opportunities for change and dialogue within the creative sector
Contribute to academic research to better understand the multi-scale and multi-dimensional nature of responding to and achieving socio-ecological transitions
My goal was to contextualise the work that we are already doing in the Creative Economies Lab, UWE, alongside the Watershed and other partners, in programmes like B+B R+D (and SWCTN, Creative Workforce for the Future, MyWorld) to create structures and funding mechanisms to support inclusive, distributed and less precarious, greener creative sectors in the region. I aimed to do this by exploring relevant academic literature on alternative economies and thinking about where these intersect with current research on the creative economy. I then planned to conduct interviews with regional stakeholders to further this thinking in a local context and better understand where interventions could be made by us or co-produced with others to ensure there are more opportunities for alternatives and help alternatives be better supported.
This blog introduces some of the outputs of this research so far. Two reviews have been created as a way of distilling my thinking during the fellowship. These are very much working papers ‘in progress’ - they have not been peer-reviewed and they simply represent an attempt to put some framings around our wider thinking and situate ourselves in current academic debates.
The first review paper explores the literature on alternative economies (as I had set out to do) but it has taken me in a slightly different direction than I expected. Rather than clearly demarcating the territory relevant to us within the different branches of alternative economies – including degrowth, postcapitalism, doughnut and community economies – I found that when these theoretical framings were being applied to examples of how they were being put into practice by various groups, it became much more difficult to delineate between the ideas, principles, and modes of analysis underpinning them.
Instead, I decided to slice through the literature around key themes that kept emerging. The review considers how often alternatives in action are practised by autonomous communities operating outside current economic systems, and explores issues of how such groups scale. It questions whose responsibility it is to intervene in a political or activist sense. It looks at the way these groups create ‘nowtopias’ which prefigure and imagine future alternatives through their experimentation with different structures and ideas in the present and proposes that academics and cultural organisations also have a remit to do this through their contributions to knowledge production and innovations. It then looks at the types of ‘we thinking’ - ways of collectivising - that are emerging as a form of articulating alternatives, which privilege non-economic values and relations, for example, thinking about care and what happens in microsocial relations outside of economic transactions. Finally, it looks at how those writing about cultural and creative industries are adopting these ideas, finding that the creative economy cannot decouple from the rest of the economy and political contexts, but that there are acts of resistance to be found and celebrated. We aim to explore this more in an upcoming conference on Fair Creative Economies.
The second review interrogates the current cultural, economic and post-pandemic recovery strategies of Bristol and Bath governance organisations. It explores growth and economic alternative narratives in this local context as well as potential spaces of intervention. Renewal strategies are focused on stimulating growth – whether it be clean, green or inclusive – but fundamentally they don’t seek to rock the economic boat. Green and inclusive growth and associated actions are narrowly conceived and the contribution creative industries can make is underdeveloped. There are opportunities in ideas like community asset transfer; tailored training and advice for creatives on green technology; linking cultural and wider policies for joined-up placemaking and alternative financial models enhancing social value. These tend to be one-off projects, rather than embedded across policy domains, but they have the potential to scale and translate to other contexts.
This research will feed into ongoing work in the Creative Economies Lab, UWE, to work with creative businesses and regional decision-makers, as well as third sector and environmental groups, to continue exploring how we can support and foster a fair, inclusive and sustainable creative sector. I’m working with Lab colleagues, Simon Moreton and Melissa Blackburn, and Professor Martin Parker at Bristol University, to specifically address this in the Bristol and Bath region through the MyWorld Programme. Part of this work will be to make visible a more diverse set of responses from the industry than is presently conceived in policy contexts. We’ll also be looking at alternative metrics to evidence success and value in the creative sectors in the Bristol and Bath region, as well as different ways to visualise and communicate alternatives to increase awareness of, capacity for, and perceptions of the achievability of alternatives.
Over the next six months I will be looking to conduct interviews and hold workshops that develop this work. Please get in touch if these ideas interest you and you wish to link with our activities: liz3.roberts@uwe.ac.uk. I’ve discussed this work more in a Watershed Pervasive Media Studio lunchtime held on the 2nd September. If you have feedback on the two reviews or think I’ve missed something important, please get in contact, as these are very much ideas in development!
