The Philippine Creative Industries Act 2021 presently moves closer toward legislative approval as pushed by active participation from a critical mass of stakeholders—government, business, and civil society associations. This bill stands as the most comprehensive to date, covering a wider range of government funding and incentive support including the formation of state-level organizations, namely, a Philippine Creative Industries Development Council and a National Secretariat for Creative Industries.
What governance path will creative industries likely to take? Will it add to centralization or decentralization? Due to several factors one of which is the archipelagic constitution of our country, government agencies at regional and municipal levels fragment responses, delivering what appear to be piecemeal solutions to limited issue areas. Proponents of the bill envision the Philippine Creative Industries Development Council to set directions for a “whole-of-government” approach to industry growth as articulated in the Philippine Creative Industries Development Plan. While the National Secretariat for Creative Industries will implement this plan by collaborating with various sectors across the country and reporting directly to the President.
As creative industries receive crucial attention in Philippine policymaking, questions about their governance become central to public debate. Searching for answers necessitates examining the intrinsic nature of creative goods and services vis-à-vis our consciousness as a people. On this path, we need to continually rediscover our creativity, our centrality as creative workers and by implication, the labor market needing to be shaped by our education and training institutions. Can the evolving governance mechanism respond to inequalities in access to education and training? What education and training do creative workers need? Existing as legal rules or policies implemented by firms and the organizational system for developing industries, education and training institutions define worker opportunities.
Creativity is linked to culture
Creative industries produce and trade goods and services described as essentially expressive, symbolic, or nonmaterial. All commodities have their nonmaterial element. Goods such as mobile phones, cars, even a doorknob, for example, and services such as transport, hotels and catering may be aesthetically pleasing, but they are primarily in the market for their functional or utility element. Creative goods and services are said to be distinct because their ultimate value lies on the expressive or symbolic—their nonmaterial, rather than their utility element.
Cultural economist David Throsby who wrote the book, Economics and Culture published in 2000, has written extensively about valuation (i.e., the process of bestowing value), and its meaning in creative industries. More importantly, developing creative industries highly depends on governing or managing the delicate relationship between two values—cultural and economic.
The expressive, symbolic, or nonmaterial element is the cultural value that lends creative goods and services almost impervious to exact measurement and quantification. Simply put, creative goods and services reflect subjectivities or intangibles like appreciation of beauty, relationship, identity, uniqueness, knowledge, and meaning. Intangibles have greater value, yet they are sold in the market thus needing to be quantified or priced for their economic or utility-exchange value. How do we reconcile the cultural and economic? How much should a dress or a wallet created from ikat weave cost? More than merely a dyeing technique used to create artwork out of weaving materials, an ikat fabric represents a way of life evolved by a people for generations.
Keen discernment of cultural value simply means treasuring a way of life. For us, it is loving our Filipino culture as conveyed by our institutions. How much of this love is imparted in schools, colleges, universities, and the media? As institutionalized in formal organizations of government, business, and civil society, how much of this love is celebrated in building communities, cities, regions and in so doing, provide impetus for creating Filipino goods and services? How much of this love is translated into policy for buying Filipino?
We, creative workers
AS we gain insights from history, we perceive a pattern of conflict-ridden, push-and-pull for material profit that pits the cultural against the economic. Nowadays, public attention accorded to creative industries is merely the most recent manifestation of a capitalist development transforming into a creative economy and society. Technological advancement likewise indicates this latest turn. As conditioned by access to technology, manifold information becomes available that inspires the creative process.
Presently, it appears that this technology-inspired creativity originates from the individual, which underscores asserting one’s intellectual property rights. We tend to nurture this image of a lone artist conceptualizing, composing, and designing a work of art. Nevertheless, evidence also shows the centrality of an agglomeration of creative people or social groups sparking creativity.
Here in the Philippines, we observe creative groupwork in our tech-modern urban spaces as well as in our rural craft communities. Talking with creative workers or artists of all kinds across the country, their endless gratitude goes to their family and friends, teachers and mentors, communities, companies, and other support organizations paving the way for their creative work. Unraveling group characteristics—starting from exploring the seedbed of creativity to examining the organization of production to distribution and trade, fosters awareness of creative work’s social dimension together with an understanding of creativity as a cultural phenomenon. The cultural is social and we, creative workers, shape our creative industries.
Education and training for creative work
Over and above cultural and economic values, therefore, the socio-cultural value of creative goods and services puts the spotlight on building a pool of creative workers. Creative workers communicate, network, or relate with each other for securing their creative spaces. Governance work for education and training includes bringing these communities of creative practice to public attention while they find articulation in public policy fora.
Our creative industries involve a great diversity of subsectors from the heritage industries to the high-tech. The Philippine Creative Industries Act 2021 encompasses a vast industry area as crafts and folk art, cultural sites, performing arts, books and publishing, film, music, animation and video games, graphic arts, and design of all kinds. These subsectors are socially, though not all are politically, organized into their respective communities of creative practice.
Two general subsectors—traditional and modern—may be cited here. Knowledge of creating traditional crafts like woodcarving and weaving is basically handed down from one generation to the next, remaining integral to their communities and the family life of artists and artisans. In this setting, formal schools for education and training hardly exist. One explanation comes from informal, random interviews of local woodcarvers and weavers who say that their young people choose other occupations that may sustain family life. Contrast this to foreign companies outsourcing Filipino creativity. Animation and other digital art and programming work outsourced abroad are stimulating private schools to open for business.
Nevertheless, education and training are still significantly acquired through learning-by-doing on the job and associating with other digital artists and computer programmers for updating styles and techniques learned from Internet sources. Unlike expensive private schools, these means of honing one’s own professional skills are largely free of cost. Another practice is organizing video calls or webinars with fellow artists and programmers regarded as role models for achieving higher levels of creativity and who now work in global companies located in world cities like California, New York, Berlin, and Tokyo.
Indeed, the evolving industry organization, including its specific or local circumstances, influences education and training. Philippine creative industries are embedded in the country’s industrial development trajectory. And as we unravel current understanding about creative industries, we also recognize the heightened cultural value of creative goods and services as they continually straddle if not oscillate between the cultural and economic as well as their individual and social characteristics. Never has industrial development been highly political and decisive to our nation than today’s social movement toward constructing governance in Philippine creative industries, particularly, in education and training.
May Zuleika Salao, PhD, is Program Director in Political Economy of the School of Law and Governance, University of Asia and the Pacific. As scholar of Hanns Seidel Foundation in Germany, she is presently a visiting researcher at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz.
