The creative economy (Howkins, 2001) emerged as a concept in the first decade of the 21st century, linking the earlier idea of ‘creative industries’ (DCMS, 1998) with the role of creative inputs to the whole economy. The debates accompanying these changes have been summarised from an international perspective by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reports (UNCTAD, 2008; 2010), which provided assessments of the creative economy and the factors that underpin its growth at differing stages of economic development.

The third iteration of the United Nations report on the creative economy, this time produced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2013), adopts a different definition and approach from those of UNCTAD and focuses on ‘uncovering the economic and non-economic benefits’ of the creative economy in order better to support local pathways to development. The perceived ‘non-economic benefits’ stem from the wider contribution of cultural development and ‘can lead to transformative changes when individuals and communities are empowered to take ownership of their own development processes, including the use of local resources, skills and knowledge and diverse creative and cultural expressions’ (UNESCO, 2013: 17). Such benefits have been discussed intensively in the cultural economics literature and stem from the particular characteristics associated with the production and consumption of cultural goods, today more often called ‘creative’ (Towse, 2003). While the initial creative rhetoric of the early 2000s may have left aside some of these points to focus on the economic contribution of many cultural or creative activities (Hartley, 2005; O’Connor, 2010), the 2013 UNESCO report calls for a return to a more complex understanding of cultural and creative dynamics and the linkages between economic and non-economic acts of creativity. Such a tilt in thinking is highly relevant to the proposition that creative citizenship offers a value-rich way of thinking about the application of creativity in a civic setting, operating at the frontier between the public and private spheres, offering a route for policy makers to consider interventions supportive of the growth of creative citizenship.

As earlier work from Markusen (2010a) pointed out, taking into account the non-economic aspects of the creative economy implies recognising the links between the commercial and not-for-profit components of what she calls the ‘creative ecology’.