KOREA FOUNDATION

Ian Thomas, Head of Evaluation for the Arts at the British Council, has been working in the fields of culture and arts for quite some time, leading a variety of international exchange projects and research. He spoke on the current status of cultural diplomacy and its future prospects.

Q. Thank you for doing this interview for our KF Newsletter readers. We understand you’re working in the field of arts and culture at the British Council. Would you kindly elaborate on your work?

My work at the British Council is centered around our arts programs. This involves evaluation as well as conducting research into arts, cultural relations, and soft power in cooperation with a range of researchers and evaluators across the globe in order to develop and share our arts evidence base in cultural relations.

Our global arts programs include our Festivals and Seasons platform, such as our Season in South Korea in 2017/2018 and Japan 2019/2020; our Cultural Protection Fund, which supports efforts to protect at-risk cultural heritage in 12 countries; and our arts showcasing work. We also have recent inclusive growth programs such as our Cultural Heritage for Inclusive Growth program in Colombia, Kenya, and Vietnam and Developing Inclusive and Creative Economies (DICE), a pilot program that takes a holistic approach to addressing entrenched issues of economic and social exclusion.

Q. At the British Council, you’re the head of evaluation for the arts. What’s the evaluation process like and how are the results utilized?

Our arts evaluation work at the British Council is centered around building our evidence base on five core themes linked to our British Council Global Arts Strategy: “Arts for Social Change,” “Capacity Building,” “Arts Showcasing,” “Creative Economy,” and “Cultural Relations and Soft Power.”

We use a range of evaluation methods that incorporate social media and network analysis, ethnographical approaches, and trust measuring, and have also developed an Arts Evaluation Toolkit and evaluation training program to help our arts managers evaluate their programs through a range of tools drawn from across the globe and mapped to our new global arts “Theory of Change.” We are particularly focused at the moment, as the British Council turns 85 years old, on measuring our work over the medium and long term and on developing evaluation approaches that can help us to gauge the long term impact of our cultural relations work.

We’ve just appointed an arts economist to our team to look at the economic evidence base of our work, in particular the links between trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), cultural relations, and soft power, all building on our Soft Power Today report by the University of Edinburgh.

The results of our evaluation work feed into future and new program design as we better understand how our arts programs work, are reported to our funders such as the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the EU, and support our learning, an aspect which is becoming more and more important to us as an organization as it allows us to share with our partners and create a global network in evaluation and arts evidence.

Q. You’re also active as a research fellow at the University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy. Britain and the United States have some of the longest histories of public diplomacy in the world, whereas Korea has relatively short experience in this field. How do you see Korea’s public diplomacy efforts at present and what are the future prospects?

Governments across the globe are increasingly recognizing the importance of public diplomacy. In particular, cultural diplomacy is considered important in fostering a mutual understanding between nations. South Korea officially embraced the notion of public diplomacy in 2010 and has since been making extensive efforts to promote its soft power assets. Notably, the Korean government has embraced mainstream cultural media as tools of soft power. Popular culture from South Korea has attracted a significant foreign audience, first in Asia and later across the globe.

The next step, from my personal perspective, is working together with other cultural relations and public diplomacy organizations to really explore how public diplomacy programs work—what works, what sort of learning and impact are we producing as cultural relations organizations—and then sharing that learning and evidence to make the case for our work.

Q. How is public diplomacy handled in Great Britain? What are the core values of British public diplomacy?

Public diplomacy is handled and led in Great Britain by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Each year, they publish a departmental plan online for the year ahead featuring top priorities. The current version for 2019/20 includes areas such as delivering shared action on the world’s most pressing challenges, shaping and strengthening the UK’s distinct role and its relationships in Europe, working around the world to sustain and improve the global economic architecture, and tackling the global threat of climate change.

The current UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Departmental Plan 2019/20 states, “We will do this by working in partnership with others and supporting an international system based on rules, norms, and values, to lead and deliver shared action on the world’s most pressing challenges in a period of geopolitical change.”

Q. As a public diplomacy expert, what do you make of recent global-level changes in public diplomacy? Is there a country that draws your attention or one that’s recently come more to the fore of discussion than it was in the past?

If we look at the current Portland Soft Power 30 Index, the five top-ranking nations in 2019 are France, the UK, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. There is relatively little movement across the chart as a whole. This isn’t really that surprising as soft power is something that evolves over time and takes years to build.

The noteworthy movers in the chart are Sweden, making the top five for the first time; the United States, continuing its descent of the charts, though still noticeably in the top five; and Canada and Japan, both surprisingly on a downward trajectory though a closer look at the data shows that this is more about Sweden’s relatively dramatic rise from eighth place in 2018 than any diminution in their soft power.

Q. Last but not least, do you have any advice for the KF or Korea about the development of Korea’s public diplomacy? Any suggestions on the direction of the KF’s future activities or advice for Koreans on helpful attitudes towards public diplomacy would be appreciated.

As I mentioned, soft power is something that evolves over time. Evaluation and learning are important to all public diplomacy programs; it’s how you know your public diplomacy initiative works or doesn’t and what impact and learning it produces.

Building long term evaluation into your public diplomacy programs is important, but so is learning and sharing your learning with partners and similar organizations. Soft power is hard and messy to evaluate and measure and we need to work together to develop the right evaluation tools—the right outcomes to track and measure, as well as data sets to really measure impact and explore how soft power works in different contexts.

Interviewed by

Kim Daniel