Policy and Planning with a Purpose of The Art of Making Choices in Arts Funding

September 2001, 20 pages. The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago.

J. Mark Schuster's paper introduced the working seminar, "The Third Arts Plan: Policy and Planning with a Purpose," held in Dublin, Ireland in September 2001. If Schuster's paper is representative of the conversation, attendees assessed Ireland's public arts council's proposed cultural plan with depth and rigor. They addressed such simple, profound questions as "How do you know that what you are doing you are doing well?" Schuster celebrates the gathering's candor: "How many Arts Councils do you know that have the self confidence — or is it the chutzpah? — to send out a reading entitled, ‘Does the Arts Council Know What It Is Doing?'”

Schuster is a lively, engaging writer, who does an excellent job of defining the terms of his arguments. He assesses the many ways that public agencies enact arts policies (including and apart from funding programs), and advocates for agencies' taking time to critically analyze the policies that define their work.

The meeting focused on the draft of a third arts plan for Ireland's arts council. Schuster reviewed evaluations, critiques, and responses to the two previous plans, and summarized reasons they fell short of defining useful policies. As is true for many agencies trying to develop guidelines that are broad enough to please multiple constituencies, earlier plans did not define clear objectives. According to Schuster, the objectives in the Council's first plan were presented in terms that left them “open to different interpretations and the issue of how to resolve potential conflicts in these objectives was not addressed.”

Yet another difficulty was the lack of specificity about Ireland's cultural landscape. Schuster suggests that Ireland's second arts plan was more successful than the first had been because, “...there are moments when it is clear that you are actually reading an Arts Plan for Ireland....” Should a good arts plan be easily adapted to multiple communities? Are the ingredients of a good cultural plan obvious and universal? In an aside, Schuster notes that years ago one of his MIT Master of City Planning students, David Katz, wrote his thesis on the emerging literature of local cultural plans. Katz planned to review multiple plans, organize them by type, and analyze the role of context in determining their types. However, reading final chapters of numerous plans, Katz discovered, to his surprise, that they were nearly identical to one another.

Schuster's working paper calls for a third Irish Arts Council plan with clearly-defined, outcome-focused objectives. While many purport to do this, few fully succeed. Frequently, Schuster notes, arts councils stop short of analytical depth by only examining their processes, not the ends achieved by their work. He points to the moment when arts councils decide among projects as the time when policies are enacted (and evaluated): “My guess is that we would learn far more about an arts council if we looked at how, when, and why they say ‘no' than by just looking at the affirmative decisions.”

This essay left me hungry to know more about the content of Ireland's Third Plan and the policy discussion that emerged. However, reading “Policy and Planning with a Purpose” is satisfying on its own terms. In a time of shrinking resources, many grantmakers in both public and private agencies are having to narrow guidelines and more clearly define programs' intentions. Schuster asks how one makes informed choices, and he defines qualities of truly useful planning documents and suggests reasons planning efforts are often derailed. The process requires political courage and intellectual candor.

Frances Phillips, Walter and Elise Haas Fund