The creative economy and the development agenda: The use and abuse of 'fast policy'

Cultural policy-like all public policy-travels at different rates. Preparation for United Nations (UN) or other intergovernmental resolutions-on culture’s multiple links with the sustainability agenda, for example-can be painstaking, lumbering, exhausting and above all, slow. On the other hand, we have seen ‘fast policy’ (Peck 2002), where ideas such as the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative economy’ gain immediate traction in their zone of origin and rapidly circulate through what has become a global circuit of such ‘fast’ cultural policy. ‘Fast policy’ is often dismissed as a superficial fad, a quick fix adopted without scrutiny, easily available to politicians and policy makers who do not have to risk much but stand to make highly visible gains (Peck 2011). This is usually so; however, it does not necessarily follow that slow policy is always deeper, more rooted in real developments, more long term in focus. Fast policy often has the virtue of touching the zeitgeist , no matter how fleeting and insubstantial; slow policy may simply become out of touch, irrelevant, as it makes its way through the opaque circles of intergovernmental negotiation and bureaucratic-diplomatic processing.