Visual artists, craftspeople, musicians, and performers have been supported by the development community for at least twenty years, yet there has been little grounded and critical research into the practices and politics of that support. This new Routledge book remedies that omission and brings together varied perspectives from artists, policy-makers, and researchers working in the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, and Europe to explore the challenges and opportunities of supporting the arts in the development context. The book offers a series of grounded analyses which cover: strategies for the sustainability of arts enterprises; innovative evaluation methods; theoretical engagements with questions of art, agency, and social change; artists’ entanglements with legal and structural frameworks; processes of cultural mapping; and the artist/donor interface.

The creative economy is increasingly recognized as a driver of development and this book also investigates the contribution made by the arts to the processes of international development, and considers how those processes can best be supported by development agencies. Contemporary Perspectives on Art and International Development gives scholars of Development Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Policy, Cultural Studies, and Global Studies a contextually and thematically diverse range of insights into this emerging research field.