The third challenge for arts and cultural policy internationally is the difficulty of justifying and measuring whether different policy options actually work. In every advanced country there is some ongoing debate about the effectiveness of diverse models or suites of cultural support. Typically, one country’s lament over its inadequate policy model is another country’s ideal or proposed solution. America envies levels of funding in Europe. Countries with arms’ length arts council envy American patronage. Direct funded countries envy both. The UK’s lottery approach has generated plenty of investment and activity but has not necessarily guided the direction of that cultural explosion. And so it goes.

Attempts to measure the outcomes and effectiveness of arts and cultural policy — even where an explicit and limited instrumentalist strategy is employed — seem doomed to failure. Various commentators suggest that the purported outcomes of investment in the arts cannot readily be translated into measurable indicators, apart from the most basic statistics (audience size, ticket or product sales or practitioner income). Reliable measures of cultural capital or enhanced citizenship remain hard nuts to crack. Further, many evaluations are conducted at the end of a project with no or little attempt to conduct longitudinal or comparative studies of the impact of a program on artistic taste or cultural participation.

A complicating factor is that the policy choices in this domain seem to be intimately tied with broader policy, political and ideological dispositions — not to mention cultural history — in ways that cannot simply be addressed by adopting another funding model. In this sense, arts and cultural policies seem to be more locked into the nuances of the past than other policy arenas. This seems to restrict contemporary policy options more so than in some other portfolios where radical changes in governmental objectives and global trends has resulted in significant re-structuring, for example, the fashion (clothing, textile and footwear) industry.

Against this backdrop, governments appear less able to re-invent their policy models to fit new circumstances and so existing policy pathways and approaches are repeated. It would require a major re-think of policy processes to abandon traditional forms of arts and cultural support and engineer genuinely new approaches. In particular, the arms’ length arts council model — so fêted in the past — seems particularly resistant. Although the failure of such approaches to achieve desired ends has been demonstrated, there is little indication of a mood to supplant these models with more effective policy machinery.

Criticisms of arm’s length agencies are commonplace and have included such things as peer review bias (for or against particular applicants and artforms); a monopolistic or closed shop mentality that excludes anything new or different; misuse of financial and administrative arrangements; niche ‘cognoscenti’ bureaucratisation of arts and culture against trends in public administration in other agencies; and insufficient funds to broadly underwrite cultural activity in the public interest. In a number of jurisdictions, arts councils have had their ambit and breadth cut back by a variety of competitors in the cultural policy fields, be that government departments, ministerial largesse, community or private sector partners other levels of government.

Moreover, policies often have had unintended consequences that have undermined the ability of central cultural policy agencies to deliver effective policy outcomes. It is tempting to argue that the elite arts council model of cultural policy is outdated and counter-productive for efficient and effective arts and cultural policy. But are the alternatives — ministerial portfolio, administrative bureaucratisation, philanthropy, partnerships, cultural democracy — any better policy options? The question remains: should these monopolistic arts agencies have to compete with alternative cultural organisations for policies, strategies, funding largesse and clients?