Transformative Edge 2024: How arts, culture and creativity impact our prosperity, cohesion, security, health and sustainability 

Prosperity impacts 

We found new evidence showing how arts, culture and creativity contribute to prosperity in 3 distinct ways:

1. Supporting national and local incomes
   • Cultural and creative activities attract income and investment that measurably contribute to national income.
   • Cultural and creative activities support the economic wellbeing of people in regional, suburban and city-centre locations.

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2. Building skills, wages and educational aspirations
   • Arts, culture and creativity generate foundational skills, such as creative and critical thinking and literacy.
   • Creative approaches could support educational aspirations through the experiences of safety they foster.
   • Creativity and creative study can generate employment opportunities, but it is difficult to generalise whether these opportunities are well paid, secure and equitable to access.
   • The non-financial benefits of creative study and work include educational attainment, participation in the community, transition into work or further study, and job satisfaction.

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3. Accelerating productivity growth
   • The cultural and creative industries contribute to growth in labour productivity.
   • Arts, culture and creativity could boost future productivity through national productivity enablers.

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Cohesion impacts 

We found new evidence illustrating that arts, culture and creativity contribute to cohesion in 2 distinct ways:

1. Building belonging across ages, places and people
   • Cultural and creative experiences foster 2 cornerstones of cohesion: a sense of belonging and trust.
   • Cultural activities, practices and expressions can prompt experiences of disinterest, disengagement and exclusion – negative belonging or ‘unbelonging’.

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2. Connecting communities
   • Arts and cultural activities provide opportunities to connect with others and socialise.
   • Cultural and creative activities counteract cohesion challenges, such as loneliness and isolation or disrupted connections.

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Security impacts 

We found new evidence illustrating how arts, culture and creativity contribute to security in 2 distinct ways:

1. Helping people to cope in times of adversity and insecurity
   • Arts, culture and creativity provide opportunities for people to feel safe in diverse circumstances.
   • Cultural and creative experiences and institutions provide spaces for people to build confidence, including in person, online and virtually.
   • There is mixed evidence of the capacity for creative and cultural engagement to reduce violence.

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2. Fostering civic and diplomatic engagement
   • Arts, culture and creativity are practical approaches for strengthening democracy, driving democratic participation and supporting peaceful, active citizenship.
   • Cultural relations advance peace and security alongside commercial, trade and other diplomatic objectives.

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Health impacts 

We have uncovered new evidence illustrating how arts, culture and creativity contribute to health in 2 ways, as follows:

1. Promoting health and health determinants
   • Creative and cultural engagement leads to positive health outcomes, with the strongest evidence being for mental wellbeing outcomes.
   • Like any recreational activity or occupation, creative and cultural engagement involves positive and negative outcomes, and emerging evidence illuminates these risks.

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2. Targeting returns on health investments
   • Cultural activities can generate positive returns on investments at the state, community and workplace levels.

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Sustainability impacts 

We uncovered new evidence illustrating how arts, culture and creativity contribute to sustainability in 2 ways:

1. Embedding more sustainable consumption and production
   • Consumer awareness of an object’s creation context and viewing artworks could influence sustainable consumption.
   • Artistic outputs and objects diffuse knowledge about sustainability topics, such as resource use, the declining numbers of threatened species and the physical impacts of climate change – a tool of climate communication.

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2. Mitigating, adapting and responding to climate change
   • Culture helps communities to preserve natural and built environments and recover from climate-related disasters.
   • Culture could assist the transition to net-zero emissions by helping people to move beyond symptomatic solutions towards developing adaptable solutions, structures and systems.
   • Creative and cultural activities are having environmentally damaging impacts upstream and downstream, with these challenges increasingly coming into focus for people and companies operating in the creative economy.

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