Between Politics and Economics: Cultural Industry Policies in Santiago de Cali, Colombia

Abstract

The city of Cali is one of the multicultural epicenters of Colombia and Latin America, a hub city of cultural industries in the country that is sustained, in part, due to a systematic set of incentives and restrictions generated mainly by the State, a set that, in this paper, we will call cultural policies. The objective of the article is to identify the conceptual guidelines of cultural policies in Cali, based on a documentary review of the literature on this subject, in order to understand the trends that guide their design, implementation and evaluation, as these generate profound socioeconomic impacts on the complex cultural ecosystem. As we will see, the main result of our documentary hermeneutics is the preponderance of ideas coming from the economics of culture that are inclining cultural policies towards an extractive utilitarian economic approach, a trend that can generate profound impacts on the socioeconomic conditions of the cultural system in Cali.