Annamari Laaksonen has been in Sydney, Australia since September 2011 working as a research manager at the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA).

Prior to IFACCA she worked eleven years as researcher and senior programme officer at the Interarts Foundation in Barcelona, Spain where her work consisted of applied research and international cooperation projects in the field of culture, human rights, development and cultural policies. Native of Finland, before moving to Spain she was a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and worked in the Latin American and the Caribbean Programme of the Carter Centre in Atlanta, USA.  Her recent publications include “Creative Intersections: Partnerships between arts, culture and other sectors” (IFACCA, 2012) and “Making Culture Accessible: Access, participation and cultural provision in the context of cultural rights in Europe” (Council of Europe, 2010).

UNESCO Indicator Suite on Cultural Indicators for Development

This presentation will be based on a work developed with Dr. Yvonne Donders (Professor International Human Rights and Cultural Diversity and Executive Director of the Amsterdam Center for International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam) for the UNESCO Indicator Suite on Cultural Indicators for Development (UNESCO, 2011). The intention of the work was to examine the relationship between culture, human rights, in particular cultural rights, and development and to suggest possible indicators to measure and quality this relationship. The UNESCO Indicator Suite had as an objective to approach culture and development from eight different perspectives, human rights being one of them. The intention of the work was to build on existing results and materials, and study the possibility of producing understandable and quantifiable indicators for approach to policy-making where legal framework provides the bases for coherent and effective cultural policies.