Central to the awareness of the role culture can play as both a driver and an enabler of sustainable and inclusive development is recognition of its intrinsic benefits: the considerable economic benefits which can flow from dynamic cultural sectors in the form of jobs as well as individual well-being, community pride and confidence which can be generated through creative activities.

The United Nations Creative Economy Report 2013 Special Edition presents a myriad of experiences that demonstrate the importance of culture in development. It shows how empowering artists, cultural entrepreneurs, local communities and policymakers to manage cultural assets can boost their cultural and creative sectors and harness development leverage from them. Still, much more must be done at all levels – by individuals, within communities, national governments, and the international development community – to promote the role of culture and the creative sector in development. Going forward, the Report presents the following ten key recommendations to forge new pathways for development.

The core social unit in which transformative change takes place is a culturally defined community, which builds on its own specific values and institutions to create economic value (material and non-material well-being); social value (the benefits of social cohesion, social stability, etc.); environmental value (benefits derived from natural resources and ecosystems); and cultural value (the intrinsic and instrumental benefits from art and culture that contribute to individual and collective fulfilment).

Sound decision-making relies not only on mappings of local cultural assets but also on hard data. While new studies measuring the economic contribution of culture to development in cities or municipalities have started to emerge, local level data are highly inadequate across developing countries. If they exist, statistics that measure outputs and growth rates in the sector are often patchy and unreliable. Gathering and analysing the necessary quantitative data will necessarily be a gradual and incomplete process. Hence qualitative outcomes must also be taken into account and valued.

Many critical factors, conditions or variables will need to be taken into consideration when taking decisions and designing policy strategies and programmes to forge new pathways for local creative economy development. These pathways will emerge from organic and iterative processes within local communities and deliberate policy and programme initiatives. Critical factors for success include financial investments along the value chain that are matched with infrastructure and labour capacities; cooperation between the agents, intermediaries and institutions required to make policies and measures work; participatory decision-making processes engaging local actors and communities; specific mechanisms scaled for local enterprise development, including capacity-building for technical, entrepreneurial and leadership skills; effective intellectual property rights that stimulate creative economies; networking through building creative clusters and support for mobile outreach; a commitment to an ethic of service to people and their aspirations that blend economic development with the need for liberation and self-identification; responding to community development and welfare needs including work conditions and informal dynamics that characterise the sector. Finally, in today’s highly interconnected and interdependent world, transnational exchanges and flows will also play a key role in any local strategy, notably as regards access to global markets and digital connectivity. In this complex scenario, fostering capacities for critical and strategic thinking will be essential for good decision-making.

The important role that capacity-building can play in the growth of local creative economies of the global South cannot be underestimated. Capacity-building initiatives for the public sector are starting to strengthen managerial and leadership skills, to empower policy makers with the knowledge to develop local creative economy strategies and to engage diverse stakeholders in the process. Investing in human capital development is a major stepping-stone on the pathway to people-centred development. This needs to be coupled with investments to strengthen systems of governance and institutional frameworks.