Knowledge Bank

This article investigates the policy design of cultural diplomacy by considering how specific tools are selected, configurated by the contexts, and serve to the goals. Cultural diplomacy is an encompassing-all topic which has the inclusivity of multiple players (state and non-state actors), multiple purposes (of different actors), multiple technologies (methods taken to achieve the purposes), and different level of scopes (resources invested, program longevity, and places operated). All these variables interact with another expand the arena of cultural diplomacy research. This article specifically targets at one type of cultural diplomacy that is large in scale and developed by the governments of great powers as a part of their responses to address changing international power dynamics, such as the British Council and the Confucius Institute. The reasons of focusing on great power cultural diplomacy practices are mainly two-told: generalizability and transferability. These long-established cultural diplomacy programs generate a set of common variables with enough variance that have potentials to explain a broad range of governmental cultural diplomacy practice and to be adopted by other countries. Meanwhile, Great power remains a flexible and open concept. In the influential book "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers", Kennedy (2010) explores the topic for hundreds pages without actually defining the term but only suggests that great power is state "capable of holding its own against any other nation" (p. 539). The difficulties in defining the terms not only imply the ingrained ambiguity of the terms, but also suggest that the term is fluid and the countries represented by the term great power are evolving all the time. Therefore, a framework extracted from great power practices has the potential to be applied to a broader range of countries. These national cultural diplomacy practices of great powers have the characteristics of being complex in their goals, policy tools, and contexts of design and operation. In order to sort out the complexities and construct a universal framework for cultural diplomacy design that is capable of explaining the rationales of governmental cultural diplomacy and the mechanism of how the it contributes to national goals, this article consults literature from IR, public policy and cultural policy in particular. The framework has three main parts: governmental rationales, available tools of cultural diplomacy, and contextual influences expressed by multi-level continuums. By connecting the three parts, this framework describes the process of designing a national cultural diplomacy program, identifies the critical factors for research and policymaking, and establishes an ecosystem to offer a holistic view of cultural diplomacy design.