Towards a framework for measuring local government return on investment in arts and cultural development

Trudie Walters, Lisa Chandler and Stephen Clark

Local Government Studies, 2019, vol. 45, issue 2, 262-280

Abstract: Local governments make a significant annual investment in arts and cultural development programmes. However, the practicalities of measuring the return on this investment have been largely overlooked by researchers, and investigations into return on investment have frequently focused on the economic return. Here, it is argued that intrinsic social and cultural returns on investment are equally important. A further issue is that measurement frameworks have often taken an outputs-based approach, seeking to evaluate the performance of one-off events rather than measuring the outcomes or impact of the total investment in arts and cultural development over the life of a policy or strategy. This paper therefore takes a broader, outcomes-based approach and offers a practical evaluation framework. An implementation-ready method is presented which will allow local government policy-makers to provide evidence of medium- and long-term outcomes and impacts of their arts and cultural development programmes and weigh this against their investment.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2018.1518220 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:45:y:2019:i:2:p:262-280

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/flgs20

DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2018.1518220

Access Statistics for this article

Local Government Studies is currently edited by Helen Hancock

More articles in Local Government Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().