Intercultural Dialogue, Cultural Policies and the Compendium:

Proposing Indicators

AUTHOR

Danielle Cliche

DATE

September 2004

ABSTRACT

In October 2003, the Conference of the European Ministers of Culture adopted the Opatija Declaration on Intercultural Dialogue and Conflict Prevention.  Among other activities it called for the collection of information on policies and programmes which support intercultural dialogue in the cultural field. 

In Autumn 2004, ERICarts developed a series of indicators on intercultural dialogue for cultural policies and investigated how these indicators could be operationalised through the Council of Europe/ERICarts project, “Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe”.

An experiment was conducted with members of the Compendium Authors Community to map some of the main public actors responsible for developing culture or media policies and programmes to facilitate intercultural dialogue. Key questions were:

• Determine which are the main government bodies responsible to promote intercultural dialogue whether at the national and / or regional or local level;
• Identify the main national cultural policy document where intercultural dialogue is expressed as an objective or priority of the government;
• Provide examples of programmes carried out by public cultural institutions and by the media to promote intercultural dialogue;
• List examples of local government initiatives to encourage intercultural dialogue.

A survey of good practices was developed by the Council of Europe and sent to the national ministries responsible for cultural affairs.  The results are to be analysed and integrated into the Compendium project.