Evaluating Cultural and Creative Transformation: Established and Emerging Methods for Societal Impact

Evaluation in the cultural and creative industries has long supported accountability, comparison and evidence-based decision-making. Yet frameworks centered on predefined outputs, short-term performance and economic return, often driven by funding, struggle to capture how cultural and creative action generates societal value through experimentation, participation, changing relationships, collective imagination and institutional learning. These limitations become especially visible in CCIs initiatives often based on inter- and transdisciplinary practice and addressing complex challenges such as climate change, technological disruption, social fragmentation and democratic participation. Cultural and creative ecosystems therefore provide important settings for examining how established evaluation approaches can be combined with more adaptive, participatory and process-sensitive methods. The challenge is not to replace quantitative indicators, but to develop credible evidence frameworks that integrate measurable results with qualitative, narrative, relational, contextual and emergent knowledge, and that recognize evaluation itself as a practice capable of shaping action, learning and transformation.

This Special Issue welcomes conceptual, empirical and practice-based contributions that advance evaluation of cultural and creative activity and its contribution to societal transformation. It seeks critical comparison of established and emerging methodologies, clear accounts of how evidence is generated and interpreted, and reflection on the conditions under which approaches are credible, transferable and useful to practitioners, funders and policymakers.

Potential areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:

● traditional, innovative and hybrid approaches to cultural and creative evaluation;
● multi-scalar and multidimensional frameworks for tangible, intangible, relational and long-term impacts;
● evaluation of inter- and transdisciplinary work, including arts-science-technology collaboration;
● participatory, narrative, creative, mixed-method and process-sensitive approaches, including their testing and validation;
● evaluation as a mechanism for learning, adaptation and transformation, not only retrospective measurement;
● connections with evaluation in environmental and social fields, including culture-based climate action;
● institutional, policy and governance conditions for adopting plural evidence frameworks;
● approaches to conceptualizing and assessing artistic intelligence, including the cognitive, emotional, relational and organizational capacities activated through artistic practice.

Authors are welcome to submit articles presenting original studies or literature review work. Please consult the journal's information regarding Article Types, Author Guidelines, and Publishing Fees. Please contact the Editorial Office at ejcmp@frontierspartnerships.org for any query concerning this initiative.

Article types and fees

This Special Issue accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Special Issue description:

• Biography
• Book Review
• Commentary
• Impact
• Mini Review
• Original Research
• Policy Brief
• Review

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Special Issue accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Special Issue description:

• Biography
• Book Review
• Commentary
• Impact
• Mini Review
• Original Research
• Policy Brief
• Review

Keywords: cultural and creative industries, impact evaluation, transformative impact, plural evidence, inter- and transdisciplinarity