Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#5 FRAMING PARTICIPATION: FROM POLICY OBJECT TO PRACTICE

By Giorgio Bacchiega

Both Compasses present participation as a democratic right and frame it as central to cultural life. Yet once translated into practice, the ambiguities only faintly perceptible in the transition from principles to policy object begin to materialise, exposing the assumptions that actually underlie the policy design. These are carried through the measures that organise how participation is shaped, by whom, and under what conditions. Given the diversity of forms it can take, the central concern is whether the instruments proposed follow the logic of the principles expressed, or they quietly redirect policy in other directions.

THE SOLUTIONS SPECTRUM
When the Commission’s Compass turns to participation in practice, its primary response to the fact that, based on Eurobarometer 562 data, 51% of Europeans did not engage in any artistic activities in the past year is to broaden access to cultural opportunities, particularly for young people. The instruments proposed include cinema passes in theatres belonging to the Europa cinemas network, the promotion of the DiscoverEU Culture Route, and the increase of the cultural offer within the existing EU youth discount card under Erasmus+. Alongside these, the document proposes a voluntary framework for the mutual recognition of culture passes across Member States and a report aimed at increasing participation among persons with disabilities. Taken together, these measures are designed to bring people into contact with cultural offerings produced and curated by others, while no comparable instruments are outlined to support forms of active participation based on creation or co-creation.

The Sector Blueprint, by contrast, approaches the same terrain with greater ambition: its Cultural Participation brief calls for the recognition and support of grassroots, non-formal practices as central components of the cultural system. Among its proposals are the establishment of dedicated long-term funding streams for community-led and participatory projects, and the strengthening of local cultural infrastructures that enable sustained engagement. It also proposes the development of Cultural Footprints as a measurement framework designed to capture the societal impact of participation, alongside structured dialogue mechanisms between EU institutions and cultural actors at all levels. This represents a significant step forward. Yet some ambiguities remain, as the mechanisms through which this support is delivered tend to rely on existing funding structures and eligibility criteria that favour formally structured organisations. As a result, most operationalised proposals remain oriented toward professional production or top-down approaches that will be developed further in subsequent articles, while community-based groups are recognised in the narrative but not fully acknowledged within the frameworks through which support is allocated.

THE GATEKEEPERS ANOMALY
The implications are very practical. When policy documents portray culture as a vehicle for developing democratic, social, or relational skills, yet remain focused on professional production and receptive access, a misalignment emerges between the ambitions expressed and the means through which they are expected to be realised. Opportunities for shared practice, the very processes through which such skills are formed, remain largely outside the policy frame. Hands-on activities foster collaborative practices that receptive participation alone cannot offer. When people take part in a community choir or an amateur theatre group, for instance, they develop craft through regular practice and shared guidance, but they also select repertoire as an expression of cultural memory, plan programming for local cultural centres, and coordinate collective initiatives such as neighbourhood festivals, practising forms of decision-making, organisation, and collectively shaped meaning that are inherently democratic. Attending a concert, however rewarding, does not develop these capacities.

Communities that only receive culture created elsewhere are seen as consumers, dependent on institutionalised gatekeepers to determine what counts as legitimate expression. By contrast, communities that constantly create and interpret their own culture exercise genuine agency over their symbolic environment. This distinction is particularly significant for minority communities and for those whose practices may not align with industrial or professionalised narrow definitions of cultural value. Both Compasses invoke culture’s role in fostering mutual understanding across communities and generations. Yet intercultural and intergenerational dialogue require that communities encounter each other as agents, not merely as audiences to each other’s productions. A policy framework that flattens participation into attendance cannot sustain the reciprocal recognition such dialogue requires: it positions minority communities as either audiences to majority culture or as performers of diversity for majority audiences rather than as autonomous agents shaping shared environments on equal terms. This also affects how people in rural and peripheral areas sustain a cultural life that reflects their own experience, rather than relying on forms produced elsewhere. The deeper question is not simply whether participation promotes democracy as a rhetorical goal, but how it shapes the conditions of democratic life itself, as the habits developed through active cultural practice are precisely those on which democratic societies depend.

THE TOURIST PARADOX
The stakes of this distinction are highest in the treatment of young people in the Compass. Eurobarometer data show that 68% of respondents aged 15 to 24 have participated in artistic activities over the past year, and that significant proportions have danced, sung, engaged in visual arts, and played musical instruments. These figures describe people creating, yet the Compass’s response positions them as tourists of their own culture, invited to visit a world built without them and that will continue to be built without them. Young people who grow up relating to culture primarily as an audience develop a very different relationship to their own capacity to act creatively and collectively, their community, and their territory than those who grow up making and governing their own cultural spaces. If European cultural policy is genuinely concerned with democratic resilience, supporting the conditions for active cultural creation among young people should be central to the project, not an afterthought to a policy of access.

This gap between principle and practice arises from problems that lie upstream of the measures themselves, especially in the data on which policy is built and in the assumptions shaping how that data is collected and interpreted. When different types of participation are treated as equivalent, policy risks defaulting to the easiest-to-implement instruments, ignoring that interventions suited to receptive engagement do not automatically deliver the outcomes that require active participation. For this reason, understanding how participation is counted, what those counts capture and what they systematically miss, is the necessary next step.

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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.