Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#9 BEYOND INSTRUMENTALISATION: ADDITIONAL LOGICS OF DISTORTION

By Giorgio Bacchiega

Drawing on the positive effects associated with cultural participation, cultural policy often treats culture as a remedy for social and democratic challenges. In the process, these associations are taken as evidence of a seamless alignment between cultural engagement and desirable social outcomes. As this premise is translated into policy frameworks, it produces a range of distortions in how cultural value is understood, with instrumentalisation as one of its possible expressions. The issue is not simply the use of culture for external goals, but the assumption that different cultural practices contribute in broadly the same way and that their effects can be taken for granted.

THE INHERENT VALUE CONFUSION
As frequently happens in public narratives, both Compasses present culture as an unquestioned positive force contributing to desirable social and democratic outcomes. This framing generates a diffuse sense that cultural participation is beneficial in itself: what begins as a way of describing associations gradually shifts into a broader, self-evident expectation that favourable effects will follow.

However, debates on contested heritage show that what is presented as cohesion may privilege some groups while marginalising others, thereby sustaining exclusive narratives of identity that overlook the exchanges through which cultures evolve. Discussions on decolonisation similarly reveal that inclusion depends on which perspectives are recognised. In parallel, cultural activity does not produce uniform effects on well-being: participation may reduce stress in voluntary settings, while in professional contexts it can involve a deep sense of insecurity. When these conditions are structurally overlooked, intrinsic value begins to merge with the notion of inherent goodness, paving the way for reductive understandings of cultural value.

When intrinsic value loses its grounding in specific conditions, policy reasoning comes to rely on
simplified representations of what culture does, treating it as a set of pre-defined functions. At this
point, further distortions emerge. The distinction lies in where pressure is applied:
instrumentalisation, for instance, operates at the level of evaluation, where practices are assessed
against what they are expected to achieve. Stronger forms of the same logic operate instead at the
level of orientation, where practices are shaped in advance to align with what they are expected to
reinforce. This is a qualitatively different kind of pressure, because it pre-configures the terms
under which value can appear.

THE COMMUNICATION CONFLATION
In the Culture Compass, culture is affirmed as a fundamental pillar of any democratic society and as vital to Europe’s way of life. Here, supported by empirical references, cultural participation is explicitly linked to openness, tolerance, democratic engagement, social cohesion, and resilience. Yet, at the same time, cultural participation and access to cultural activities are described as essential to “promote” active citizenship, introducing a normative horizon in which engagement is understood primarily in relation to what it is expected to support, and becomes meaningful insofar as it aligns with immediately recognisable political goals.

In the Sector Blueprint, the International Cultural Relations brief develops a different articulation of the same concern. Culture is explicitly framed through a people-centred and values-driven approach, focused on peer-learning networks and equal partnership in shaping priorities and outcomes. Here, emphasis is placed on co-creation as a structuring principle of cultural relations. This horizontality extends into the Security section, where investment in independent cultural production is described as a strategic defence against hybrid threats. Yet, culture is then once again situated within a context of countering disinformation and manipulation while “promoting” democratic values, reintroducing the same normative expectation.

In both documents, the word “promotion” reveals a delicate tension. If free expression is not an output of democracy but one of its core pre-conditions, cultural value should be able to emerge without fixed expectations attached to it. When culture is treated not as enabling democratic and social life but as delivering it, its communicative dimension begins to dominate and creates an environment where practice becomes a vehicle for conveying pre-approved messages rather than a space in which meaning is autonomously generated. This approach, then, risks taking the shape of domestication, the progressive adjustment of cultural support to fit the predefined goals that frame its operation.

THE POLICY MISALIGNMENT EFFECT
Irony surfaces when these ambiguities are taken to their limit. Both Compasses, for instance, frame the climate crisis as at once environmental and cultural, and call for mobilising artistic activity to support collective transformation. Here, a further paradox arises beyond instrumentalisation: under the banner of measurable impact, sustainable practices can find themselves dismissed for failing to demonstrate what they quietly enact every day. In this context, the least green-impacting forms, such as community arts, may be told they lack sufficient “ecological ambition” because they are deemed insufficiently transformative when set against grand visions of systemic change, despite the fact that they embody precisely the behaviours that environmental policies hope to cultivate.

This paradox is structural rather than incidental. In trying to engineer cultural contributions to planetary challenges from above, institutions risk overlooking the practices that do not brand themselves as solutions to a problem but simply live the values in question. In this context, a rhetorical focus on outcomes obscures the difference between promoting sustainability as a subject of discourse and supporting sustainable ways of living as a cultural reality.

What becomes decisive, across all these cases, is the separation of lived cultural processes from the institutional formats through which value is brought into view. The practices most deeply involved in sustaining democratic and ecological life risk becoming less visible than those more easily translated into policy language, not because they are less significant, but because they do not communicate explicit messages in the terms policy recognises. What begins to loosen here is the continuity between what culture does and what policy is able to see. It is this structural separation that prepares the ground for another question: what happens when cultural value is defined primarily in the gap between where it is produced and the terms under which it becomes intelligible?

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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.