A growing awareness of the cultural effects of imperialism, and its political dimension, prompts a revision of the approach to cultural management from a decolonial perspective. The need to recover perspectives from the global South is evident in the debate on how to enable the transformations that this approach calls for. This book presents the state of the art of South American cultural management by practitioners and researchers whose work is generally limited to the Spanish-speaking world.

Cultural participation is repeatedly demanded by European cultural institutions. In the implementation, however, not all citizens are considered equally. Hence, it is about time for a reformulation and a rethinking.

Cultural institutions and initiatives are implementing participative formats for quite some years. But still, cultural policies in Europe focus on participation rather rarely both regarding their own decision-making processes as well as the institutions they support.

European cultural policy is a bricolage with an uncertain sense of scope, in a certain way directed towards European cohesion, but without focusing its own measures towards this goal and the particularities of the sector. The book "The Future of Cultural Policies” describes these contradictions and aims to identify possible solutions.

Recently, India has been highly active in entering into various international partnerships and devising a set of new policies. However, the country still has no genuine and coherent arts and culture policy to adequately showcase the country’s cultural riches.

With the increasing enthusiasm for the "smart city", the interest for the paradigm of the creative city has flattened out again. This, however, has not prevented the renowned British publisher Edward Elgar from persuading Charles Landry to write another book on the subject, although it seems that everything, or at least much, has already been said in his previous books.

In "Art and Economics in the City - New Cultural Maps", the authors examine different ways arts and culture have been framed in policies, interventions, discourses and projects in cities around the world. Although urban policies are a very locally rooted subject, the book contributes to creating a body of knowledge necessary for interpreting international practices and gaining a deep understanding of the current challenges and tools available.

In a lot of countries, arts organizations seem to be publicly funded for their mere existence without being audited continuously for their efficiency or social impact. At the same time, civil society plays an active role in the shaping of cultural policy. How could we combine both demands? The learnings of the new public management models implemented by several states in Brazil for their cultural institutions can shed light on the role of government and civil society in the cultural landscape and on the possibilities of true and effective partnerships among them.

Ratified international conventions are one of the most important instruments on cultural policies. For instance, the 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions aims to contribute to culture and development worldwide. But how exactly do such agreements work? How can they benefit a balanced global art economy and how can arts and cultural professionals make use of them for their own practices?

The cultural management students Rebecca Baasch and Svenja Reiner attended for us the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR), which took place in Hildesheim, Germany from 9th to 12th September. In this article they describe their impressions as upcoming managers.