A System That Doesn’t Deliver
Across the world, momentum in the creative economy is expanding. Policies are being developed, frameworks adopted, and ambitions clearly articulated. Yet, outcomes remain limited.
In many contexts, the foundations already exist - cultural policy, trade frameworks, IP systems, and investment instruments. The intent to support the cultural and creative sectors/industries is clear. But intent is not performance.
What we see instead is a consistent pattern: fragmented implementation, weak coordination, and limited translation of policy into practice. Creative enterprises struggle to scale, IP systems underperform, and trade and investment opportunities remain largely underutilized.
The instinctive response is often to refine policy or develop new strategies. But this misses the core issue. The challenge is not policy. It is delivery.
Creative economy governance spans multiple domains—culture, trade, finance, innovation, education, and yet these rarely function as a coherent system. Policies define direction. Institutions hold mandates. Funding enables activity. But none of these, on their own, ensure that the system works. What is missing is the layer that connects them.
Between ambition and impact lies a gap where coordination breaks down, roles remain unclear, and value struggles to circulate across the ecosystem. Until this layer is addressed, creative economy strategies will continue to produce isolated successes but limited systemic results.
The Blind Spot
Governance discussions tend to focus on what is visible: ministries, laws, and funding. But they rarely address how the system functions. This is the blind spot.
In many contexts, the issue is not the absence of policies or strategies. It is the absence of mechanisms that connect them and make them work together. Mandates are fragmented, frameworks operate in parallel, and stakeholders rarely interact in structured ways.
The system appears complete on paper yet fails to function. What is missing is not another layer of policy, but the relational infrastructure that enables coordination, alignment, and delivery.
Intermediaries as System Infrastructure
If the issue is how systems function, the question becomes: who makes the system work?
Intermediaries are often seen as support actors—hubs, incubators, accelerators, service providers operating at the margins of the ecosystem. But this framing is too limited.
Intermediaries already perform functions that are central to system performance.
They translate policy into practice.
They connect actors across silos.
They enable access to markets, finance, and networks.
They structure participation and collaboration.
Seen from this perspective, intermediaries are not peripheral. They are operational infrastructure: policy–market translators, coordination mechanisms, and relational operators that structure how the ecosystem functions in practice.
What Intermediaries See That Others Don't
If intermediaries are the system's interfaces, their role becomes visible in what they enable.
When structured and capacitated, they drive two critical outcomes:
Capability building — strengthening enterprises and ecosystem actors
Market activation — enabling access to trade, investment, and IP monetisation
But their role goes further.
They enable the creative economy to function as a connected system, strengthen enterprise capability, unlock access to markets, investment, and IP value chains, and facilitate coordination across actors that would otherwise remain disconnected. In fragmented ecosystems, they often become the mechanisms through which collaboration, participation, and ecosystem circulation occur.
Because intermediaries operate across policy, markets, institutions, and creative communities simultaneously, they occupy a uniquely strategic position. Operating between systems rather than within a single mandate, they experience the ecosystem as a whole. They do not experience isolated challenges; they see recurring systemic patterns, where coordination fails, where value stalls, and where frameworks break down in practice. This gives them a form of system intelligence—the ability to identify structural failures across cases, not just individual constraints.
This is why their absence becomes consequential.
They create feedback loops between policy and practice, translate frameworks into action, structure participation, and build networks and value chains. They play a central role in coordination and orchestration across fragmented ecosystems. It is precisely this between-systems position that makes them a core component of the operational layer through which the creative economy moves from intention to performance.
Without a strong intermediary layer, policies remain declarative rather than operational. IP systems struggle to translate ownership into economic value. Trade and investment frameworks fail to reach creative enterprises in meaningful ways. Ecosystems become fragmented, reactive, and difficult to scale.
What is often interpreted as a policy failure is, more accurately, a failure of system coordination and delivery.
The Shift: Integrating the Missing Layer
If intermediaries are central to how creative economy systems function, they must be treated as part of the infrastructure of delivery.
This means:
formal recognition within governance systems
integration into trade, IP, and investment frameworks
development of operational standards and mandates
Looking Forward
If the missing layer of creative economy governance lies in how systems are connected and activated, then the challenge is no longer to define the creative economy, but to make it work.
This requires moving towards structured delivery systems, where roles, relationships, and coordination mechanisms are made explicit across the ecosystem.
The forthcoming Africa Creatives Alliance Pathways for Creative Economy Delivery, authored by Johanna Kouzmine-Karavaïeff, builds on this premise. It addresses not only the role of intermediaries but also the wider governance and institutional architecture, as well as the core systems of IP, trade, and investment that remain underdeveloped in many contexts. Its focus is on how these elements can be aligned and operationalised through relational frameworks that enable coordinated action.
Ultimately, the future of the creative economy will be determined not by ambition or policy design, but by the ability to translate both into functioning systems.
