CO-CREATION AS A MEANS OF CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IN LOCAL CULTURAL POLICY MAKING

Abstract

We have experienced a shift in local cultural policy making towards a more participative governance during the last decades in a situation when understanding of the meaning of culture in cultural policy has enlarged and cultural policy makers are concerned with more active actors in the field, including cultural prosumers. In the meantime, we can observe in our contemporary cities new creative forms of civic activism trying to build sustainable and livable places with creative professionals engaging as facilitators of these creative change processes in local communities. Co-creation approach is a recent trend in public governance to ensure the engage- ment of local citizens as equal partners in developing, implementing and evaluating creative solutions for local problems related to raising the quality of life. The application of co-creation approach in local cultural policy making is still comparatively new and experimental, but one can find multiple good practice case studies in Europe, although the understanding of this new concept varies in different contexts. The goal of this article is to analyse the available literature in order to clarify the use of co-creation concept in the field of culture in different contexts along with the similar concepts of co-production and co-design, to identify the purpose and possible gains of applying a co-creation approach in local cultural policy making.