Just two and a half years after its founding, the Network Brokering Intercultural Exchange has achieved to bring together arts and cultural researchers and professionals from numerous continents and countries and to address the difficulties of the international cultural sector. The Annual Gathering in May 2019 on "Democratizing the Arts and the Arts Sector" has once again put its finger on the wound and shown how far the international cultural sector, despite all its ambitions, is still from equal rights and participation.

At the 3rd International Conference on Audience Research and Development, the focus was on EMOTIONS in museums. What role do they play in visitor engagement? We all know that emotions drive actions and arousing them - whether positive or negative - is the best way to achieve lasting connections to learning experiences and generating memories.

‘Courageous Citizens’ aims to address the ‘role of culture in social change’ through interviews, excerpts from speeches, photographs and scribbles. Rather than a practical guide, it is an almost philosophical collection of observations and experiences of arts professionals on the question of how arts and culture besides institutional structures can help reflect current societies and create more equal ones by courage and empathy.

Ratified international conventions are one of the most important instruments on cultural policies. For instance, the 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions aims to contribute to culture and development worldwide. But how exactly do such agreements work? How can they benefit a balanced global art economy and how can arts and cultural professionals make use of them for their own practices?

Pablo Picasso’s is an excellent example to show how art has the power to make us better people. The importance of combining art and critical thinking skills, in a myriad of formal and informal approaches, can prove very effective in improving the quality of life for individuals and societies. This article discusses how the creative/ artistic mind, in tandem with the problem-solving/ practical mind, can better serve pursuits of happiness, shape our values, and reach for higher goals, especially in times of crisis.

Do you sometimes feel like the world is getting worse and worse and you are surrounded by only negative news? Well, as studies have shown, we humans tend to overestimate negative developments and turn a blind eye to the positive ones. Therefore, with this issue of Arts Management Quarterly, we present you examples, experiences and approaches from arts professionals around the world that will help you when you feel helpless in the face of financial, political or even institutional crises.

Arts Management is a broad field where a lot of things happen simultaneously. New approaches are constantly appearing on the tableau and most of them disappear very quickly again. Together with experienced researchers, Constance DeVereaux has taken on the difficult task of identifying the most promising ones for her new volume - published 2018 by Routledge - and mapping their status quo between theory and practice.

Most book reviews are written without including feedback or background information by the author. For this review, Constance DeVereaux decided to not only write about Jim Volz’ latest book "Introduction to Arts Management” but to additionally talk to him about why he thought another introduction to the field was needed.

This or a similar formulation can be found in various study and examination regulations of arts management study courses: The aim is "to enable graduates to meet current challenges in the cultural sector in a competent, creative and solution-oriented way". That is good - and yet still too little.

During the first Global Cultural Leadership Programme (GCLP) in 2016, forty young cultural leaders travelled from across the globe to meet in Valetta, Malta for one week. We - Alison Uttley (Canada), Beth Ponte (Brazil), Faye Hobson (Ireland) and Ruhi Jhunjhunwala (India) - were members of the inaugural cohort of the GCLP and the experience proved to be transformative for each of us in unexpected ways.

What is leadership if not a relationship and role we take within a community? We live in complicated times that urge us to embrace new forms of leadership. And since arts and culture can give us deep insights into how we form relationships and how we relate to the world and help us envision leadership styles beyond neoliberal approaches, leadership in this sector should also focus on caring and growing.

Arts management is an increasingly international and transcultural field of work where there are no concepts and definitions of Cultural Leadership valid and applicable to everyone. Therefore, this issue of Arts Management Quarterly wants to show different perceptions characterized by specific working realities, professional biographies and regional contexts.

The responsibility of cultural managers in transformation societies was the central topic of the first winter school for master's and doctoral students organised by Heilbronn University and the Brokering Intercultural Exchange (BIE) network with participants from 16 countries. It took place at the end of November 2018 in Berlin in cooperation with MitOst e.V. and the Robert Bosch Cultural Managers Network.

Over the last thirty+ years the Fine Arts have found themselves in an increasingly tight squeeze between a rock and hard place in most Western countries. Their development shows why not every arts market segment can be measure by the same criteria – like an egalitarian community purpose, financial independence or adaptation to capitalist logic – and why there is still a need for Arts for Art’s Sake.

Leading an institution in a period of change is one of the toughest challenges in cultural management today. As director of the philharmonie zuidnederland (South Netherlands Philharmonic), Stefan Rosu developed the idea of an independent scientific centre on Classical Music to conduct research on orchestras and advise them regarding innovation and renewal.

In the beginning of September 2018, the German Library Association invited me to travel to Latvia and Lithuania to trace the status quo of digitization in big and small libraries in Riga, Klaipda, Plunge and Vilnius together with a group of German journalists. Above all, I took one thing with me: compared to Germany, digitization is a matter of course in the Baltic States.

How to build an independent art scene? For those directly involved in the Lubumbashi Biennial in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this is an urgent question that has clear social consequences. By investing in its own locality while forging its place in the world, the Biennial is leading the way.*

We have witnessed the development of the field of arts management with its own professional identity and academic programs around the world. But one wonders if its theoretical framework, curricula and approaches really respond to the reality of the different countries, especially when considering the distinction between North and South. The book Introduction to International Arts Management by Raphaela Henze assumes the important role of provoking this discussion.

On 27 September, Dr. Alba Victoria Zamarbide Urdaniz from Waseda University in Japan was announced as the winner of the 5th ENCATC Research Award on Cultural Policy and Cultural Management for her PhD on "Re-defining the role of 'buffers' in the management of the historical territory. The discrepancies between theoretical concepts and practical interpretations of 'buffer' zones in Eastern and Western Cultural World Heritage sites.”