Collective place leadership: lessons from culture

This paper explores the contribution of culture to place leadership. Adopting a relational approach to place, and using placemaking as a theoretical bridge between place and the cultural sector, it analyses three examples which brought local voices into place leadership through cultural policy and practice. The case studies highlight how people shape places from the periphery of formal leadership structures, and demonstrate how developing effective place leadership through cultural practice means nurturing these distributed knowledges and practices. This has significant implications for scholarly understandings of place leadership, and for the ways in which policymakers seek to incorporate local identities and voices within governance practices. The paper concludes that leadership capacity must be seen as constitutive of how place is actively negotiated, if place-based policy initiatives are to truly reflect local context and serve the collective good.