A New Approach – Transformative Edge 2024, October 2024
How arts, culture and creativity impact our prosperity, cohesion, security, health and sustainability.
Executive Summary
ANA’s new report, Transformative Edge 2024, reveals that creating and encouraging opportunities for people to experience arts, culture, and creativity assists populations to live well – with prosperity, cohesion, security, health and sustainability.
Using widely accepted metric tools, Transformative Edge 2024 shows that creative and cultural engagement provides an unexpected edge to tackle Australia’s deepest challenges. These challenges include reduced social cohesion, mounting ill health, slowing productivity growth, increasingly frequent climate related disruptions, strains on democracy and economic hardships restricting what people in Australia can afford to do.
Global and domestic pressures are bringing new urgency to developing effective, innovative and accessible strategies to secure Australia’s future. Transformative Edge 2024 includes the latest evidence of the impacts of creative and cultural engagement for these key public policy discussions.
ANA is publishing this summary of new studies to support evidence-led investments of time and money to benefit people in Australia.
We explored 2 main questions:
- What are the demonstrated impacts of arts, culture and creativity on prosperity, cohesion, security, health and sustainability?
- What are the opportunities for stakeholders to scale up, enhance and harness the benefits across Australia?
The findings in Transformative Edge 2024 build on ANA’s 2019 review of international and Australian evidence.
The findings are presented using ANA’s ‘Prosperity Cohesion Security Health and Sustainability Wellbeing’ (PCSHS Wellbeing) research framework. This study is the first to consider how time use in arts, culture and creativity influences all 5 broad wellbeing themes of Measuring What Matters: Australia’s First Wellbeing Framework (hereafter Measuring What Matters). 1
People spend time and money engaging with cultural and creative industries for varied reasons – enjoyment, inspiration, expression, entertainment and connection.
The personal benefits of culture are well recognised. Industries, governments and the public ‘all believe that arts and culture make people happy, increase their understanding of each other and the world, and connect them together’.2 However, it is clear that people also believe there are broader impacts of the time and money spent on arts and culture – and the current evidence supports this.
There have been few attempts in Australia to move beyond listing isolated benefits, and no single source summarises potential drawbacks. Explaining all the evidence can be time-consuming and complex, as can
understanding the broad policy environment.
Transformative Edge 2024 bridges these gaps and paints a very clear picture: a rich cultural life delivers significant economic and social benefits to the Australian community.
Creative and cultural engagement here and around the world could help Australia tackle complex challenges facing future generations. Numerous new informational resources outlined in this report may help industries and stakeholders drive other public benefit objectives, such as inclusion, fairness and equity
See also: Media Release: A New Approach (ANA)
