Jenny Mbaye

MIASA Project: Grounding cultural policy and governance in West African academia

This project explores the contours and challenges of postgraduate educational programmes dedicated to cultural policy and governance as academic field in West Africa. It is concerned with the influence of political and policy developments on artistic and cultural practice| as well as the capacity of creative practices to ‘step up’ and resolutely inform the sphere of politics and policy in African contexts. With growing interests in the roles of culture and creativity for (urban) economy and development, African insights into these processes are still conspicuous by their absence both in policy and academic debates. The project is thus a response to this lack of African account on urban cultural economy, and looks into postgraduate education aligned with the imperatives of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) to approach, address and understand these current active forces of social transformation inscribed in African creative sectors. This project thus aims at analysing the state of the art of postgraduate education in cultural policy and governance in African contexts and at examining how the format and content of such trainings are linked to broader issues of sustainable development. Located at the intersections of creative economy, cultural politics, urban transformation and sustainable development, it focuses on the different educational spaces of arts and culture, with a specific attention to processes of cultural policy-making and governance in African contexts.