Towards a framework for measuring local government return on investment in arts and cultural development

Local governments make a significant annual investment in arts and cultural development programmes. However, the practicalities of measuring the return on this investment have been largely overlooked by researchers, and investigations into return on investment have frequently focused on the economic return. Here, it is argued that intrinsic social and cultural returns on investment are equally important. A further issue is that measurement frameworks have often taken an outputs-based approach, seeking to evaluate the performance of one-off events rather than measuring the outcomes or impact of the total investment in arts and cultural development over the life of a policy or strategy. This paper therefore takes a broader, outcomes-based approach and offers a practical evaluation framework. An implementation-ready method is presented which will allow local government policy-makers to provide evidence of medium- and long-term outcomes and impacts of their arts and cultural development programmes and weigh this against their investment.