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Examining the global creative and cultural industries (CCIs), this book seeks to help readers understand key policy challenges faced by the sector.
It reveals a key contradiction: while the sector is praised for flexibility and innovation, it suffers from job insecurity and unequal value distribution due to its close ties with neoliberal economics. The book proposes a justice-focused ecosystem approach that reshapes cultural policy to prioritise fair working conditions, inclusive participation, and public cultural benefits. Readers will develop analytical skills to understand the sector's contradictions and gain practical tools for building stronger local creative ecosystems. The work helps readers assess how policy measures and organisational structures affect creative workers, while showing how to align cultural policy with labour rights, platform regulation, climate action, diversity, and decolonial practices. It uses multiple research methods, including historical policy analysis, theoretical frameworks, and systematic examination of policy definitions across national and global contexts. It reframes local policy through ecosystem thinking, focusing on support networks, affordable workspace, funding, and fair employment. It examines how digital platforms and new technologies like AI, VR, and AR affect creative ownership and contracts.
Finally, whether academics, students or industry professionals, readers of
Global Creative and Cultural Industries Policy book will gain a holistic understanding of global policy as it pertains to the creative and cultural industries.
List of contents
1. Cultural Policy and a Creative and Cultural Industries 'Paradox' - An Introduction 2. Historicising the Creative and Cultural Industries as a Global Policy Construct 3. Definitional Tensions, the Creative and Cultural Industries, and the Implications for Policy 4. From Instruments to Ecosystems: Re-Specifying Place-Based Creative Industries Policy 5. Revolutions, Crisis, and Resilience: Implications for Creative and Cultural Organisations 6. 6. Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Intellectual Property Rights 7. The Existential Threat of Climate Change, the Creative and Cultural Industries, and Cultural Policy 8. The Problem of Social Exclusion in the Creative and Cultural Industries 9. Decolonising the Creative and Cultural Industries: Beyond Diversification Towards Structural Transformation 10. The Way Forward: From Paradox to Praxis in Cultural Policy
About the author
Tarek E. Virani is Associate Professor of Creative Industries at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in the School of Arts within the College of Arts, Technology and Environment. His research spans urban and cultural policy, creative and cultural ecosystems, organisational resilience, hubs and clusters, culture-led regeneration and the international dimensions of creative work. He is recognised for shaping ecosystem approaches to the creative and cultural industries and for applied research that bridges scholarship and practice across city-regional programmes. His work foregrounds intermediaries, shared infrastructures and fair work as foundations for resilient cultural production. His publications and projects engage policymakers, cultural institutions and industry partners. He regularly contributes to public conversations on creative-economy resilience and policy design.
