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Overview
Creative Scotland is a public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across all parts of Scotland. The organisation enables people and organisations to work in and experience the arts, screen and creative industries in Scotland by helping others to develop great ideas and bring them to life. It distributes funding from the Scottish Government and The National Lottery.
Creative Scotland’s impact assessment of their funding policy for organisations for which they provide regular, ongoing funding has some key principles relating to the benefits of a strategic EIA approach. They present, in the first part, a clear strategic rationale, evidencing the business case for the value of EIA in their policy planning process centred around evidence-based strategy and policy and as a tool for formalising thinking and planning in a complex area. The second part provides some insight into how they use this tool in practice, and how their EIA’s link to a wider strategic agenda. They use their Equality Outcomes as an overarching, longer term equality strategy.
Analysis and relevance to project principles
Use of a strong business case provides a firm grounding for a meaningful EIA, while taking equality outcomes as the organisations highest level equality priorities, means they have a clear framework for considering equality areas and assessing risks and impacts or opportunities. Using EOs in this way at an organisational level ensures that strategy and policy development in all policy or operational areas (such as this funding policy) consider and align with their stated equality aims. This also means that the work they have done to develop these Equality Outcomes (developing evidence, horizon scanning, consultation, prioritisation, etc.), is naturally embedded in subsequent policies. EIAs then become a tool for both strategic alignment and mainstreaming (consistency in equality activity) at Creative Scotland.
The Creative Scotland case study underlines the principles and benefits of a strategic approach to comprehensively draw together and consider equality in a co-ordinated manner.
It is worth noting that the EIA (part two) also contains useful examples of issues, potential impacts and actions identified for protected characteristic groups. The case study also refers to the use of internal tools to provide equality prompts to non-specialist staff, supporting a mainstreaming approach across all areas of work and decision making.