Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#12 TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED CULTURAL POLICY

By Giorgio Bacchiega

Although the two Compasses emerge within different environments, one shaped by European governance and the other by the experience of the cultural sector itself, both are driven by the sense that culture can no longer remain at the margins of public policy and must instead be understood as a fundamental part of the wider democratic and social ambitions of the European project. However, this movement of culture towards the centre of policy changes the terms through which culture itself becomes visible to institutions, since access to support increasingly depends on the capacity to describe practices around objectives defined elsewhere in terms that make them administratively admissible, while some of their core dimensions remain outside view. From this perspective, the positioning of culture within external policy agendas opens the question of a more integrated cultural policy, one capable of sustaining the cultural ecosystem as a whole. Such an approach would seek to preserve the conditions through which different forms of cultural life can continue to coexist over time without being forced into a single model of legitimacy.

THE PARTICIPATION RECOGNITION
Across both Compasses, participation functions as the primary entry point through which culture is translated into policy objectives. Yet the forms of participation that tend to gain visibility are those aligning most easily with the ways institutions demonstrate effectiveness. What counts as participation is therefore gradually drawn towards models shaped by professional production and its corresponding logic of access, while other ways of taking part in cultural life, often those without formal recognition, remain at the edges of what policy language is able to register.

As a result, policy identifies goals such as democratic resilience or cohesion to be tackled by targeted interventions while the everyday practices most closely linked to how these effects naturally develop over time are not necessarily the ones most consistently supported. The problem lies in the gap between declared intentions and the logics through which those intentions are implemented: the categories used for evaluation reflect the assumptions that shape the design of those same instruments, so that what comes to the surface is, in large part, already shaped by what the system was designed to register. Even when terms such as co-creation or community engagement are used, they rarely shift this underlying orientation, since they are absorbed into frameworks that privilege participation structured around formal channels rather than forms arising from grassroots lived collective practice.

By contrast, participation find its meaning where encounters with culture extend into forms of involvement rooted in everyday settings and sustained over time, rather than remaining confined to isolated moments of access or to institutional forms of activation that privilege new initiatives over the cultural continuities already present within a territory.

THE ECOLOGY CONDITION
From this perspective, cultural richness ceases to refer to the multiplication of similar experiences and appears through the coexistence of forms that remain connected while operating according to their own logics: professional production and informal community practices occupy different positions within the same field without being reducible to a single hierarchy. Cultural practices contribute to democratic and social life in distinct ways and never through linear sequences of cause and effect. Instead, they take shape within environments where shared experiences allow more durable forms of collective life to emerge. Because these processes exceed short evaluative cycles, policy cannot engineer them directly, and its role should rest on safeguarding the conditions through which they can continue.

Moreover, spontaneous cultural life does not present itself as discrete activities designed around predefined objectives, and therefore is less visible within institutional systems than projects able to align themselves with the priorities of a given policy cycle. A choir rehearsing every week for decades, for instance, is not simply producing events or reaching isolated social effects. It maintains a continuous form of collective life in which what policy tends to distinguish into separate categories, such as cohesion or well-being, is generated without clear separation. This is what makes the choir culturally significant, but it is precisely what most institutional frameworks, designed to capture outcomes one by one, are not designed to see.

THE LEGIBILITY DILEMMA
The limits of recognition become particularly evident in participation data such as the Eurobarometer surveys used in European cultural policymaking, where the need to produce comparable results across heterogeneous contexts leads to the use of stable categories that can only capture certain dimensions of cultural involvement. Here, over the span of a year, someone attending a single cultural event and someone taking part in a weekly collective practice are registered as equivalent, as though forms of participation sustained over time and those limited to isolated access could produce comparable effects once expressed through the same indicators. What is lost in this equivalence is the dimension of agency through which the broader social effects that policy seeks to identify take shape.

A similar dynamic develops when survey instruments build on stabilised definitions of culture. Questions about the perceived importance of culture across the population assume a shared referent within contexts where cultural life is organised through very different institutional histories and everyday practices. For someone in a rural community whose cultural experience is rooted in local traditions never formally described as art, the question may register differently than for an urban respondent whose engagement is structured around attendance at museums and cultural institutions. Both responses remain sincere within the logic of the instrument, yet the differences that give them meaning exceed the categories through which comparison becomes possible. What the data records in such cases is not straightforwardly what it represents, and when policy is built on that foundation, the gap between measurement and reality quietly enters every decision that follows.

These oversimplifications do not stay at the level of representation. Once they become part of governance systems, as data for informed policymaking, they begin to shape legitimacy and funding priorities in ways that favour practices able to align with dominant regimes of recognition, while other forms remain harder to justify and therefore harder to support. Recognition does not simply describe cultural practice; it participates in shaping it.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE QUESTION

If recognition shapes what becomes thinkable in policymaking, infrastructure refers to the conditions that allow cultural practices to persist. It includes different layers that make cultural life durable, such as affordable public spaces, spatial proximity, continuity of relationships, and availability of shared leisure time, among others. When these conditions weaken, especially in territories marked by demographic change or territorial fragmentation, participation becomes increasingly dependent on institutional mediation. However, cultural ecosystems do not automatically reproduce themselves once formal supporting institutions exist. They depend on relationships capable of enduring across local contexts and generations, and these relationships are often the most fragile dimension of infrastructure. When they disappear, rebuilding collective participation becomes considerably more difficult than restoring a physical site. At this point, what disappears is more than an activity; it is the accumulated social texture through which cultural practices remain collectively inhabitable.

The same fragility extends into digital environments, where infrastructures of circulation are largely governed by private platforms with limited public capacity to shape how cultural expression is encountered and created. For audiences, cultural works increasingly move through hybrid flows where they appear alongside entertainment, news, advertising, and political messaging. The tacit agreement that once accompanied entry into cultural spaces, a shared understanding between artists and audiences that experiences which elsewhere might even seem inappropriate or offensive can be approached as part of an autonomous space of expression, loses stability when encounters occur through continuous exposure shaped by immediacy and reaction. These dynamics also affect active participation. Communities that organise cultural practices partly online find that their activities are gradually reorganised by platform environments structured around economic priorities. The question, then, is whether communities retain the capacity to decide how and to what extent they engage with these systems, including the possibility of relying on democratically shaped digital spaces or of remaining partly analogue, particularly where cultural practices depend on physical co-presence and shared time.

Infrastructure, however, extends beyond questions of space and connectivity. Both Compasses place strong emphasis on fair remuneration and working conditions for cultural professionals, recognising that creative freedom depends on material security. Yet the question of fairness becomes more complex once cultural participation is considered beyond professional structures alone. Much of cultural life takes place through forms of involvement organised within leisure time that are closer to gift-economy relations than contractual labour arrangements. Community choirs and amateur theatre groups exist outside market logics and it is precisely this relative autonomy that allows their continuity across time. From this standpoint, where participation concerns the capacity to shape shared symbolic worlds as part of the broader right to take part in cultural life, fairness cannot be reduced to compensation intended as remuneration, but must extend to the practical conditions through which informal participation remains possible, from access to shared facilities and light administrative arrangements to the availability of time within increasingly constrained economic conditions. This is where an integrated cultural policy begins to take shape most concretely, as infrastructures determine what forms of cultural expression remain sustainable across time. Where participation, artistic freedom, democratic resilience, and digital cultural infrastructures intersect lies one of the most delicate frontiers of cultural regulation: the preservation of the environments in which cultural practices can continue according to their own rhythms and modes of organisation.

THE TRANSLATION EFFECT

] Taken together, tendencies within contemporary cultural policy increasingly structured by administrative translation encourage forms of adaptation through which cultural actors adjust their practices to meet predefined requirements. Attention then shifts away from long-standing practices that had already demonstrated their capacity to produce many of the effects now translated into policy objectives, in favour of activities that align more directly with simplified administrative readings of complex problems within a given short funding cycle. As a result, the priorities that shape support structures increasingly enter into cultural life itself. What begins as an external requirement gradually becomes a reorientation from within.

This dynamic also risks reshaping the relation between culture and democracy in a very specific and underexamined way. When cultural participation is evaluated primarily through its demonstrable effects on democratic life, democracy begins to appear as an output of participation rather than its precondition. The inversion matters. Cultural practices do not produce democratic capacity in the same way a targeted intervention produces a measurable outcome. They sustain the conditions under which democratic life remains possible across time within evolving societies. Once these processes are assessed primarily through the outcomes they generate, the conditions that allow them to function as such are already being altered.

As informal practices rooted in reciprocity become harder to sustain, the challenge facing an integrated cultural policy lies less in connecting culture to wider policy domains than in preserving the spontaneous forms that allow cultural plurality to remain meaningful at the level of everyday life. The issue is not that governance translates culture. Translation is unavoidable wherever institutions allocate resources and define priorities. The difficulty begins when translation risks ceasing to serve its purpose by becoming the primary condition through which cultural practices acquire legitimacy. At that point, recognition no longer supports cultural life; it begins to reorganise it around the same requirements through which it is recognised.

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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.