Chapter 7: When Does a Relational Ecosystem Become a Community?
Chapter 5 examined the smallest unit of relational life: a relationship between two parties shaped through communication, cost exchange and expectations across time. Chapter 6 then showed how care orients judgement within these relationships and becomes more reliable when repeated through organisational practice.
A festival’s relational ecosystem is formed when many such relationships become interconnected. A curator’s relationship with an artist affects production workers; a director’s commitment to a funder creates expectations and costs for others; a volunteer coordinator’s communication shapes whether volunteers can participate responsibly; an audience member’s encounter may influence how the festival is spoken about within a family, community or network. The relationship between two parties remains the basic unit, but its consequences do not remain between those two parties. They travel across other relationships.
When similar relational patterns are repeated, they also become organisational conditions. Information may become reliably accessible or repeatedly delayed. Responsibility may be distributed or concentrated. Contributions may be recognised or allowed to disappear. Expectations may support trust or produce recurring disappointment. In this way, relationships between people form organisational culture, while relationships within and beyond the organisation form a wider relational ecosystem.
Every recurring festival develops such an ecosystem, whether or not it does so consciously and whether or not the relationships are caring. The ecosystem may be collaborative or fragmented, sustaining or depleting, open to influence or organised around dependency. It is a field of interdependence in which what happens within one relationship can alter the communication, costs, expectations and possibilities carried within others; it is not automatically a community. Some relationships may appropriately remain contractual, temporary or primarily instrumental. A supplier can be essential to the festival ecosystem without becoming part of a festival community. A funder, artist or audience member may be connected to the festival without experiencing belonging or assuming responsibility for anything held in common. Different artistic, professional, local and participant communities may also overlap within the same ecosystem without becoming one community.
Community is a particular relational possibility that can develop within this wider ecosystem. It begins when some relationships move beyond contact and exchange towards shared practice. People contribute through their own agency, perceive and recognise one another’s contributions, develop expectations of continuity and assume appropriate responsibility for something they understand as partly held in common.
CONCEPTUAL MOVEMENT
- Relationships Between Two Parties → Interconnected Relationships → Relational Ecosystem → Shared Practice → Belonging → Continuity → Collective Memory → Shared Responsibility → Community.
This is not a fixed formula, nor must every relationship within the festival ecosystem complete this movement. It is a lens for recognising how the relational principles already examined in this Reader can, under particular conditions, generate a shared relational world.