On May 21, the COREOM program launched its "Territories in Practice" cycle by choosing to highlight a central theme for overseas dynamics: the role of culture as a lever for development. Behind this choice lies a simple conviction: culture is not a showcase; it is a resource that nourishes education, the economy, the environment, and social cohesion.
Nearly fifty participants, connected from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion, Mayotte, as well as from mainland France and several neighboring countries, were able to listen, exchange, and debate concrete case studies and feedback. The quality of participation demonstrates the importance of this topic and the need to create a space for mutual understanding and sharing of methods.
Culture as a dual register: artistic and development
One of the first clarifications provided by the keynote speaker, Valeria Marcolin of the NGO Culture and Development, concerned how to coordinate existing mechanisms. She recalled that any overseas cultural project can be situated on two registers: on the one hand, international artistic cooperation, focused on creation, the mobility of artists and the dissemination of works, falling under the DAC and the network of French Institutes and SCAC; on the other, development cooperation through culture, where the challenge is to measure the social, educational, economic or environmental impact, and which then mobilizes the offices of the MEAE, the AFD, or mechanisms such as the Regional Cooperation Fund or Interreg.
The same project can navigate between these two shores, but only if the story, partners and indicators are adapted.
Valeria Marcolin – NGO Culture & Development
This distinction, far from being theoretical, allows project leaders to better target their funding requests and avoid misunderstandings.
The question of impact and indicators
A shared concern was that of evaluation: how to prove the impact of a cultural project without distorting its artistic essence? The answer was to remain modest but rigorous: choose two or three priority Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), formulate a simple theory of change that links activities, effects, and impacts, and document everything with a few clear indicators (attendance, skills, jobs created, charters signed). The strength of cultural projects is also to produce intangible effects, which can be captured through stories, verbatim, images, or sounds. The requirement is therefore less to enter into a heavy quantitative logic than to demonstrate the relevance and credibility of the path taken.
Four emblematic case studies
Four initiatives illustrated this diversity of approaches. In Réunion, the MoVa association presented “La Route des Plantes – le Chant des Forêts,” a project that brings together artists, artisans, and holders of ecocultural knowledge through joint residencies and exhibitions. Here, art becomes the medium that makes plant knowledge desirable and practical, while encouraging sustainable practices and initiating micro-artisanal sectors.
In Guadeloupe, Arts au Pluriailes showed how a project initially conceived as an artistic residency between the Caribbean and West Africa gradually evolved into structuring support for its partners, faced with visa and mobility constraints.
From Martinique, ZOFI and La Station culturelle championed a Caribbean oral arts platform, combining residencies and story mapping. Their strength was to speak the language of the SDGs without losing the voice of the artists, demonstrating that curatorial rigor and objective-based evaluation can coexist.
Finally, in Mayotte, the Hip Hop Evolution association illustrated how hip-hop, over the past twenty years, has established itself as a true social infrastructure: a space for expression and emancipation, but also a professional sector tied to the social and solidarity economy and geared towards cooperation with East Africa. Here, we are moving from a project that does to a project that gets done.
Questions, needs and perspectives
The discussions helped identify concrete needs. How can cash flow be secured when European funding only partially covers advances? How can visa costs be factored in and mobility made equitable? What forms of consent and benefit sharing should be adopted when promoting sensitive knowledge related to biodiversity? How can we move from events to sustainable initiatives anchored in framework agreements with communities, schools, or natural parks?
To each question, possible answers emerged: pre-financing through lines of credit or flow sponsorship, mobility equity funds, “mirror” residences allowing everyone to work in their own region when travel is impossible, ethical charters and adapted licenses to protect knowledge.
Beyond technical solutions, one idea pervaded all the testimonies: culture is a pillar of sustainable development, not just a showcase. It structures neighborhood cooperation in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean basins and gives overseas stakeholders the tools to invent shared futures.
And after?
This first meeting opened up new perspectives. Participants expressed a desire to extend the discussions with practical training on project engineering and the SDGs, financial planning and cash management, ethics and rights related to knowledge, as well as on the structuring of cultural sectors linked to the SSE.
As one speaker summed up: “Creation opens the door; structuring keeps it open.” This sentence could serve as a common thread for the entire COREOM program, which has, among other things, made the commitment to support projects where culture is at the heart of the dynamics of cooperation and solidarity in the overseas territories.