Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#8 ON INTRINSIC VALUE AND THE LOGICS OF INSTRUMENTALISATION

By Giorgio Bacchiega

Cultural policy debates often revolve around the balance between two closely related ideas. On one hand, culture is valued as something meaningful in itself; on the other, it is understood through its contribution to wider policy goals. When these two perspectives meet in policy documents, intrinsic value may gradually narrow, while expectations linked to external priorities tend to expand. What counts as meaningful is then slowly renegotiated, with consequences for the conditions under which culture is supported. In the process, what begins as a question of framing becomes a question of substance.

THE INTRINSIC VALUE EXPANSION
Intrinsic value is often used to defend culture from external pressures, grounding cultural practices in their ability to express shared symbolic meanings not reducible to direct utility. However, this understanding is tested when the same practices are included in broader policy settings and are expected to contribute directly to social goals such as well-being or social cohesion.

This translation is not in itself problematic. Cultural activities have always been part of everyday social life, and their effects often extend beyond the contexts in which they emerge. Yet a shift occurs when they are placed within evaluation frameworks that operate across shared cross-sector goals, where cultural value must be expressed through indicators that make it comparable. This becomes visible, for example, in the case of a community choir. Its activity is already widely recognised as supporting the well-being of those involved through sustained shared practice and the bonds that form around it. This recognition is precisely what allows cultural value to be extended into the language of external policy agendas. Yet once this connection is established, the choir may be required to demonstrate its contribution through predefined indicators. The practice itself does not change immediately, but the terms in which it is evaluated do, and those new terms begin to shape how the choir is first justified, then organised, and finally funded. In doing so, it risks altering the conditions that allow the choir to function as a setting in which well-being is generated. As a result, what counts as culturally significant becomes increasingly shaped in relation to external policy expectations, and intrinsic value is progressively reconfigured from within as it adjusts to policy metrics.

THE INSTRUMENTALISATION DRIFT
Such a scenario becomes visible in how policy documents frame the relationship between culture and well-being. Both the Sector Blueprint and the Culture Compass recognise the intrinsic value of participation, treating it as a fundamental dimension of individual and collective life. What emerges, however, are two different ways of calibrating the balance between intrinsic and instrumental value once this relationship is translated into policy settings.

Building on the definition of health adopted by the World Health Organization in 1948, which understands health not only as the absence of disease but as a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, the Sector Blueprint positions cultural practices within a broader ecology of conditions that sustain a meaningful life, both as means and ends. Their value is grounded in processes that take shape through ongoing engagement, in which active and receptive forms of participation are associated with specific benefits that cannot be reduced to a single metric and that depend on the nature of the practice and the contexts in which it takes place, maintaining coherence between how value is articulated and how participation is organised in practice.

The Culture Compass follows a broadly similar direction, recognising cultural practices as contributing to quality of life, community bonds, and mental health. In principle, this approach opens space to support a wide range of participatory ecologies, including community-based and collective amateur practices, through which people learn, build relationships, and take care of themselves and their community over time. However, this orientation is not reflected in the Commission’s Compass in a comparable range of operational measures. In practice, support is channelled through a single mechanism: social prescribing within primary care settings, where healthcare professionals identify non-clinical needs and refer individuals to a link worker, who connects them to community-based activities.

THE RECOGNITION CONDITIONS
The discussion around social prescribing is often framed in terms of effectiveness. Yet the issue is not simply whether social prescribing “works”, but how it is made to appear as working. Cultural practices are first selected, then organised, and finally assessed according to their capacity to operate within a therapeutic context. Participation is thus redefined as an intervention, with temporalities aligned to treatment cycles and effects assessed through health indicators. What changes are the terms under which intrinsic value is applied: cultural activities are deeply context-dependent and unfold through evolving relationships, which makes them difficult to capture through standard clinical models of evidence. As a result, the indicators used to demonstrate impact tend to reflect the requirements of medical evaluation systems more than the dynamics through which cultural engagement produces lived meaning.

Within this logic, a community choir becomes most visible when its value can be expressed in terms of reduced clinical appointments or improved health indicators. Its role as a sustained space of relationship-building and shared practice tends to recede behind the outcomes it is expected to demonstrate. What was previously understood as supporting well-being becomes framed as something expected to produce measurable well-being, with consequences for how cultural forms are recognised and supported. This shift does not simply replace intrinsic value with instrumental reasoning, but changes how intrinsic value itself is defined.

Instrumentalisation, in this sense, does not operate only through the alignment of culture with external agendas, but through gradual shifts in how intrinsic value is recognised as practices travel across policy tools. The question therefore shifts from what culture is asked to do, to which interpretive frames are considered legitimate in recognising its meaning. From this perspective, what begins as an external requirement becomes, in the process, a redefinition from within.

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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.