Unsettling and reordering the creative economy
By Dr Steven Hadley (Co-Editor in Chief, Cultural Trends) and Karen Brodie, Deputy Director, Creative PEC
Cultural Trends Global Dialogue, Lima Peru 2025
As researchers, consultants and practitioners we often enjoy the unperceived and unacknowledged benefits of belonging to a particular network or community. Yet who we cite, collaborate with and hear speak either upholds and reinforces or unsettles the geopolitical economy of ideas, and the associated intersectional systems of power contained within them.
The Global Creative Economy Council (GCEC) led by Creative PEC and British Council, is unique as a global forum for policy know-how and tacit knowledge from across the creative economy, providing inclusive perspectives from five continents, across the Global South and Global North. From these provocations and insights, the GCEC draws on its collective intelligence to develop ideas and produce work on issues of global significance in the creative economy that support national, transnational and multilateral policies and standards.
GCEC members contribute to conferences, summits and meetings around the world to broaden perspectives and advance conversations. The traditional academic conference format is not always suited to achieving this, so Cultural Trends, the global academic journal, developed the ‘Global Dialogue’ to find innovative and flexible ways to engage beyond the usual communities. The Cultural Trends Global Dialogue model is a new initiative, designed to build global partnerships and relationships through exchanges in flexible event formats.
Cultural Trends Global Dialogue has been designed to enable dialogue between researchers, scholars, policy makers and practitioners from different geographies, traditions and socio-economic contexts. It recognises, as the GCEC does, that dialogue between the Global North and Global South is crucial for addressing global challenges, fostering a more equitable world order, and ensuring the success of international efforts like climate action and sustainable development.
The ethos of the Cultural Trends Global Dialogue model is premised on the local host being invited to design the structure of the event within, and co-created in response to, the context of the host country. Content and themes respond to local initiatives and concerns and seek to foster a trans- and inter-disciplinary approach. By design, dialogues are as porous as possible, and accessible to practitioners, artists, policymakers, international cooperation officers, academics and activists.
Each Cultural Trends Global Dialogue follows a different format that responds to local needs and priorities. This might mean, for example, that keynotes are given as free public talks, or that the registration fee is kept deliberately low (or that there is no fee at all). Practical issues such as access to travel funds, differing academic calendars and differing hierarchies of approaches and engagement can all act as barriers to dialogue. This new and iterative format seeks to address these.
The inaugural event took place at the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center in Santiago de Chile from 28-30 November 2023. That dialogue, organised by the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage and the University of Chile, saw over 250 delegates from 16 countries and 5 continents come together to debate and discuss cultural policy in a format designed to be non-hierarchical, open access and sector-facing.
This November, Lima will host the next Cultural Trends Global Dialogue furthering Peru’s ambition to establish the country as an important location for North-South dialogue on cultural policy research. As was evident from the inaugural Global Dialogue, in a Latin American context the creative economy has profound consequences for local cultures in an ever more global web of digital platform hegemony. Dialogue is vital to increase awareness of the downsides – as well as the potential – of cultural economies in an uncertain global landscape.
Under the banner of Cultural Policy and Sustainable Development: A Global Dialogue, themes for this Global Dialogue range from cultural policy and indigenous rights to climate action, urban development, cultural heritage, digital transformation and artificial intelligence. Co-designed by a team of Peruvian cultural policy academics, policy makers and practitioners, this event will generate a community of researchers from Europe, Latin America and beyond. The motivation of this Global Dialogue event is to develop future networks with – and between – academics from Latin America and their peers at a global level. Partnerships come from a range of international cooperation organisations and networks, including the GCEC, British Council Peru, Cultural Centre of Spain in Lima (AECID), the Ibero-American Secretariat, Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), UNESCO Peru and the United Nations Development Programme.
In the creative economy, a global dialogue can help to challenge dominant perspectives and promote the inclusion of diverse voices and knowledge to suggest new options for developing countries. To facilitate this, workshops and panels will be in either English or Spanish, with simultaneous translation for keynotes and larger sessions. In line with the ethos of the Global Dialogue to ensure that access is as broad as possible, keynote talks will be free and open to the public and there will be no registration fee. Importantly, a Special Issue of Cultural Trends will be published, which will subsequently be translated into Spanish.
Plans for 2027 are already underway, ensuring that colleagues and partners from previous events remain involved whilst continuing to extend the scope of who is ‘at the table’. Each event is a learning curve, a sharing of culture and practice, and inevitably a comparison of the often-torturous administrative processes of academia. But whilst this work is complex and difficult, it is vital that platforms such as this one are used to further and broaden global dialogue.
Cultural Policy and Sustainable Development: A Global Dialogue will be held at the PUCP campus in Lima, Peru, on 5-7 November 2025. This event, organised by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú -PUCP, is part of the Global Dialogues on cultural policy series from Cultural Trends.
For more information about the event, please contact:
Cultural Trends
Dr Steven Hadley, email: sdjhadley@gmail.com
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú – PUCP
Santiago Alfaro Rotondo, M.A. email: salfaro@pucp.pe
Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash
