The Performing Arts Ecosystem in Abu Dhabi: Sustainability, Resilience, and Local Capacity Building

Abstract

Cultural and creative ecosystems have increasingly become a focus for cultural policy and a central concept in social research. Ecological approaches help overcome some of the limitations of earlier conceptual frameworks such as cultural and creative economy, cultural and creative clusters, cultural and creative industries—by examining cultural and creative activity from a broader ‘whole system’ perspective, including recognizing the importance of a wider range of actors’ networks and relationships. Ecosystem intermediaries that bring together the necessary agents tend to be analyzed in the academic literature through at least two prisms: the most common contemporary usage tends to emphasize an individualist interpretation; and an older usage points to a more collective and state-driven interpretation. However, depending on the context, the concept of ecosystem is open to various meanings. Since cultural production capacities are locally anchored, the potential of the ecosystem to sustain itself is related to local variables that can combine several heterogeneous logics. This chapter offers an evidence-based approach and assessment of the resilience and sustainability of Abu Dhabi's performing arts ecosystem. Through cross-contextual analysis of interviews with stakeholders, this research identifies groups of intermediaries in the Abu Dhabi performing arts ecosystem that bring together elements of the ecosystem while being directed by different logics. Next, the analysis interconnects the identified ecosystem intermediaries and the relevant general knowledge elements on the ecosystems. This approach permits the identification of the first linchpins of ecosystem sustainability assessment in Abu Dhabi and enables further articulation of the local and global dimensions within the ecosystem paradigm. It also aims to address the gap that currently exists in qualitative surveys focused on the rapidly developing cultural field of Abu Dhabi: while Abu Dhabi has a rich heritage in traditional music and performance, the situation of performing arts as a cultural and creative ecosystem is relatively recent and is shaped by contemporary realities of the UAE.