Indicators for local policies of cultural welfare: content, dimensions, and quality criteria

Wellbeing measures are gaining consensus as complementary to the traditional GDP approach when it comes to assessing the development of countries and communities. Cultural Welfare is a new, integrated approach aimed at promoting the wellbeing and health of individuals and communities through practices rooted in the arts and in cultural heritage. Recently, experimental tools have been devised and applied, with reference to either specific target groups of beneficiaries or individual cultural/artistic disciplines, the purpose of which is to measure and assess the contribution to individual and societal wellbeing, as well as the health of cultural and artistic participation and practice in general. Policies aimed at promoting cultural welfare need a robust body of evidence, and indicators may contribute to supporting them. While measures for the assessment of the culture-and-wellbeing relationship have been proposed at the national level or at the level of individual organizations or programmes, the level of local policies appears still largely unexplored. The article discusses a few theoretical and methodological issues and proposes a set of quality criteria for designing cultural welfare indicators on a local scale.