Creative Industries and Urban Policy in Kazakhstan: Institutional Instruments of the Almaty and Astana Akimats

Abstract

The article examines how the akimats of Almaty and Astana build instruments to support creative industries under incomplete decentralization. The problem lies in the gap between the national goal of doubling the creative sector's contribution to GDP by 2029 and the limited fiscal autonomy of cities. The theoretical framework is metagovernance, in which the akimat is treated as an institutional intermediary between the state hierarchy, business, universities and cultural organizations. The aim is to explain differences in the institutional density of creative policy in the country's two largest cities. The empirical base includes city development plans, legal acts, budget materials and Bureau of National Statistics series for 2018–2024. The study combines a structured comparison of cases, document analysis with an open codebook and the diagnostic IMKC index. In 2024, Almaty and Astana accounted for 76.6% of the country's creative gross value added, while Astana is more specialized in the creative sector (location quotient 3.0 against 1.9). The IMKC index equals 5.0 for Almaty and 3.0 for Astana. In 2021, when Almaty created a dedicated department and wrote an indicator, a fund and hubs into its plan, Astana's creative sector was larger. The hypothesis that institutional density directly follows the economic weight of the sector is therefore not supported. The difference stems from the akimat's managerial choice and from the division of roles between the city and the national bodies concentrated in the capital. The novelty lies in operationalizing the functions of urban metagovernance for a post-Soviet city and in a diagnostic tool for comparing them.