SACO Conf2022 Creative Economy Reset Post Conference Publication 2024

Overview

The South African Cultural Observatory’s Fourth International Conference, or #SACOConf2022, took place at the end of 2022 amid trying times for all nations and people, but Africans in particular, as the impact and after-effects of COVID-19, climate change, heightened international conflict, disrupted supply chains, and mounting inflation collided to produce severe uncertainty for the world economy. At the time of publication (2024), these challenges still remain in place.

For developing economies and the most vulnerable – many of whom are creatives doing precarious work – these crises amount to an ambush on global and local ambitions for the sustainable growth of nascent creative economies. Yet they are just symptomatic of an increasingly uncertain future of shocks for which we need to prepare and approach with trends in mind, cognisant of big challenges around sustainability, gender, inclusivity, and decolonisation; and the value of South-South cooperation and trade relations.

These persistent and omnipresent threats are complex and painful, and present a significant challenge for policy makers, big and small business, civil society leaders and organisations for value and supply chains, and the creative producer, maker, and worker. The #SACOConf2022 event was one of the steps toward preparations that need to take place to facilitate a real reset of the creative economy, especially in African countries and South Africa in particular, while we adapt to a global state of perma-crisis in the overall economy.

We made an open, global call for papers in early 2022, but specifically sought voices and perspectives from the Global South and Africa. The resounding worldwide response was an indication of the demand for a platform to share learnings about local experiences and global trends and how they interact in the creative economy in the wake of COVID-19. Over the course of the conference, delegates engaged in more than 23 sessions and heard presentations and inputs from 98 speakers or panellists from 18 countries, many of them from the Global South.

A time of crisis can also be a time of experimentation and adaptation and offers an opportunity to refocus on the core purpose and values of the creative sector. Many of the contributions to this volume speak to crisis zeitgeist, and the ways in which hope allows one to imagine possible and preferable futures for the creative industries.

We are proud to say this post-conference publication, and the submissions collected from conference presentations, has created a record of the discussions and debates that took place at the conference in November 2022; and frames the kind of reset that is needed.

The publication – which holds significant inputs from leading researchers and academics, alongside practitioners, funders, and civil society – helps us better understand shifting trends, tensions, and possibilities in the cultural and creative industries as we try to shape a sustainable and inclusive future for all.