2022 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"
16th Edition
The city of Ramallah launched in Nov. 2017 (Resilient Ramallah 2050) strategy with a vision of the city: optimistic, sustainable, Inclusive, proud of our own culture and in control of our own destiny. The strategy specified in relevance to the city’s analysis; 3 strategic directions reflected in 37 actions; where culture was at the heart of this strategy.
The (Resilient Ramallah 2050) strategy revealed the necessity of a cultural policy for the city as part of the strategic planning for Ramallah as a resilient city.
At that point, Ramallah Municipality did a survey to collect data and map the cultural scene in the city as a step before organizing (workshops, focus groups and meetings) with the main actors in the scene. The municipality also started to communicate with UCLG (United Cities and local Government) to cooperate as a consultant with the city on the policy, meanwhile the city started to contact local artists, cultural organizations, educational organizations, representatives from the civil society organizations, public bodies, cultural committee from the city council and the mayor to put things all together to share the process with them in advance.
As mentioned in this application,The Palestinian cultural policy model is a non-systemized model predominantly oriented to the nonprofit sector. The model has limited grass roots orientation and works well in the central part of Palestine and in major cities. At the national level, the administrative functions of culture are carried out by the Ministry of Culture which doesn’t fill the necessary and required needs of the cultural sector.
The Ramallah Municipality believed in the decentralization of cultural policy and in culture as a major pillar of development, where social development is connected to culture.
The municipality managed to identify strategic interventions in culture on a city level a process that started officially in 2010 in a conference organized on the Role of Local Governments in followed by another conference in 2011 under the title of “Ramallah and its Cultural Development”. Stakeholders from all of Palestine and relevant public sectors met to discuss how the role the Ramallah Municipality could potentially play in the shaping of cultural policy. These conferences were followed by a series of specialized meetings and sessions that worked on a coherent cultural policy for the city of Ramallah in partnership with all stakeholders operating in the scene. The strategic interventions at that time had different elements among which are: assisting legislators in formulating the laws that aim at the preservation of tangible cultural heritage, presenting public spaces as a main venue of cultural and social events, emphasizing the necessity of securing semi-public funding for art and culture in a country where most of the funding to this sector comes from the donor community, introducing the concept of wide and horizontal and grass roots partnerships, expose the general audience into different forms of art and culture, reutilization of educational tax (from solely schools construction to include also the support of educational and creativity projects), linking art and culture to income generating vocations and allowing for the needed training and possible absorption on the market system and the promotion of cultural diversity and social cohesion in the city of Ramallah that hosts populations from all over Palestine and also from Palestinian returnees.
These interventions at the city level were part of the discussions during 2015 and 2016 during the participatory process of creating “Resilient Ramallah 2050” strategy that was in support of 100 Resilient Cities network. Part of the actions of the strategy had a specific focus on cultural development, which opened the discussion to officially adapt a written cultural policy for the city late 2019. And In March 2022 - With the cooperation of UCLG, The city adapted an official participatory Cultural Policy “Culture is Integral to Resilient and Sustainable City”.
The policy will be translated in priorities and actions through a dialogue with stakeholders, measures will be linked to the actions and the policy will be evaluated every 4 years with stakeholders. The policy also will have a steering committee from educational and cultural operators in the city reflecting different sectors and fields in culture.
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