Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#11 CULTURE AND THE ECOSYSTEM GOVERNANCE THRESHOLDS

By Giorgio Bacchiega

Frequently invoked as both a democratic principle and a policy objective, cultural participation depends on material conditions that allow people to inhabit culture over time. Alongside access to professional production and institutional programming, cultural life also emerges from a wider everyday ecology of practices that policy frameworks often leave unexplored. Once these dimensions are taken into account, the question of scale becomes unavoidable: how can support systems engage with forms of cultural vitality that do not correspond to institutional size? The issue, here, is under what conditions different forms of participation are able to flourish without being absorbed into a single organisational model.

THE SCALE DILEMMA
Across both the Culture Compass and the Sector Blueprint, infrastructures and funding systems are presented as necessary conditions for culture to remain socially meaningful. Access to these conditions, however, is shaped by assumptions about how cultural organisations are expected to function, particularly in relation to practices that operate below the threshold of institutional recognition. In the Sector Blueprint, the International Relations brief highlights how inequalities continue to restrict participation, while also calling for funding mechanisms to become simpler and more accessible. Yet questions of scale complicate the picture, as many forms of cultural life develop through activities that do not easily fit within formal systems of recognition.

Some barriers can be addressed quite directly. Restrictive visa regimes or complex procedures often limit cultural exchange in immediate ways and can therefore be simplified. Other requirements, however, operate differently. Formal organisational structures, measurable outputs, fixed timelines, or institutional partnerships reflect a particular understanding of cultural activity which, when applied broadly, excludes practices that rely on the capacity to respond flexibly to local needs without extended administrative mediation. The challenge, then, is to design support mechanisms that can also engage informal practices without turning them into institutional actors by default, since policy frameworks often approach scale as a marker of development, treating smaller initiatives as incomplete versions of larger professional structures.

Some barriers can be addressed quite directly. Restrictive visa regimes or complex procedures often limit cultural exchange in immediate ways and can therefore be simplified. Other requirements, however, operate differently. Formal organisational structures, measurable outputs, fixed timelines, or institutional partnerships reflect a particular understanding of cultural activity which, when applied broadly, excludes practices that rely on the capacity to respond flexibly to local needs without extended administrative mediation. The challenge, then, is to design support mechanisms that can also engage informal practices without turning them into institutional actors by default, since policy frameworks often approach scale as a marker of development, treating smaller initiatives as incomplete versions of larger professional structures.

THE INFORMAL UNDERESTIMATION
Once the question of recognition is addressed, continuity comes into focus. The Blueprint’s Working Conditions chapter proposes a charter built on Fair Pay, Fair Share, and Fair System, starting from the idea that cultural participation depends on the economic conditions needed to sustain creative work with dignity. This is relevant in contexts marked by precarity, including many community-based artistic initiatives, where unpaid labour is the norm. Yet it also raises a more complex question: how should principles of fair remuneration apply to practices where unpaid participation is not exploitation, but a mode of voluntary engagement?

Community choirs and amateur theatre groups, among the others, often take place in leisure time, where people create for reasons that extend beyond monetary compensation. Cultural labour must be remunerated where appropriate, but professional work and voluntary cultural engagement do not necessarily follow the same dynamics. Many community-based practices rely on exchanges closer to gift-economy relations than to contractual labour arrangements. Here, participation is primarily oriented towards shaping shared symbolic worlds. When participation is read exclusively through working conditions, culture risks being reduced to production rather than understood as a broader social process that sits between intrinsic cultural value and wider policy ambitions. Yet many of these undervalued forms of participation embody precisely the democratic and social ambitions both Compasses associate with culture.

In these contexts, fairness cannot be reduced to remuneration alone, but should also involve access to public facilities, light administrative support, participatory forms of governance, and the availability of time within increasingly economically constrained conditions. Within the Culture Compass, whose conceptual architecture remains largely structured around cultural industries, the problem appears in a structural form. Here, grassroots participation is acknowledged, but not fully integrated into its framework. This leaves cultural practice exposed to a binary framing: either recognised as labour that requires remuneration, or left outside policy consideration altogether. Many amateur and community-based practices operate precisely in that space beyond market and institutional rationalities, sustained through collective stewardship, and they are not to be considered incomplete versions of professional culture. They are distinct ways of keeping culture alive that often remain invisible, even though they are rhetorically acknowledged as fundamental to its continuity in everyday settings.

THE COMMUNITY DEFICIT
The same pattern becomes visible when cultural participation is considered in relation to the transmission of knowledge. Both the Compass and the Sector Blueprint prioritise formal, top-down settings over more distributed learning environments. They rightly point to the weaknesses of arts education, where schools are often under-resourced and cultural programmes are increasingly vulnerable to budget cuts. Yet the underlying structure remains largely unchanged: in responses such as partnerships between schools, artists, and non-formal providers, schools continue to function as the primary site of cultural formation, while other settings remain in supporting roles.

At a broader level, however, this framing only partially reflects how learning is understood in contemporary policy thinking, particularly within the UNESCO lifelong learning perspective. People do not only receive top-down education in their lives; they also learn through practice among peers. In this understanding, learning extends across formal, non-formal, and informal settings as a continuous process, rather than being confined to schooling. From this point of view, community-based learning is not peripheral to cultural development, but part of its basic infrastructure. The Eurobarometer data indirectly reflects this dynamic, even if it is not always read in these terms in policy interpretation. Higher levels of formal educational attainment are associated with higher rates of participation in artistic activities, not because creativity is unevenly distributed, but because educational trajectories facilitate access to cultural confidence and exposure to cultural environments. Informal learning matters precisely because it opens entry points into participation that do not depend on institutional credentials or prior cultural capital.

Different practices, therefore, depend on distinct conditions and do not pursue the same kinds of outcomes. Some are structured around professional production and depend on stable funding and formal organisation, while others are rooted in informality and reciprocity, where what is sustained is shared practices. In this sense, a cultural ecosystem can be considered healthy not because it is organised around solutions whose validity is assumed to be universal, but because it allows different practices to coexist without losing what makes them distinct. This is where the wider discussion begins to converge: on the recognition that cultural policy is inseparable from decisions about which forms of cultural life are given the time, space, infrastructures, and freedoms to persist.

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This series is intended as a critical yet constructive contribution to the Culture Compass debate, exploring where active participation challenges existing policy assumptions and where new frameworks may emerge. Future entries will address participation versus access, indicators and measurement, and the place of grassroots practices within European cultural ecosystems.

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Consulta Periferie Milano is a network-centric platform (formally a second-level association of undertakings or association of associations of undertakings) formed by 36 cultural, charity, trade, visual and performing arts organisations, cultural centres and local newspapers active in the peripheries of Milan with the purpose of drawing constant attention and find original solutions to the problems of the multifaceted peripheral landscape of Milan in cooperation with academic, political and societal forces.