Strategic Linking of Cultural Public Policies (Belén, Santa Ana & Escazú)

This was my first peer-reviewed paper. I compared how three Costa Rican cantons known for strong cultural development — Belén, Santa Ana, and Escazú — actually managed and governed their local cultural policy, wanting to understand, qualitatively, what practices of governance and implementation separated cantons with genuinely developed cultural outcomes from those without.

Analyzing cultural strategy, cultural structure, budget, and citizen organizations as the core variables of implementation, the study found a consistent gap in how these municipalities defined and executed cultural strategy — one that showed up in policy-design choices, in how budgets were prioritized, and in which actors got a seat at the table, often concentrating cultural activity in central districts rather than distributing it across the canton.

The work was published as a peer-reviewed article in Administrar lo Público, building on the undergraduate thesis I co-authored on the same three cantons. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more about the study.