The governmental geometry of culture: Who has a seat at the table?

One of the most interesting things emerging from my five year study on global learnings from Covid has been the difference between issues where experience round the world was broadly the same, and others where it was strikingly different. I was fascinated to understand what made some impacts so ubiquitous, where others varied wildly from country to country, culture to culture.

For example, one difference was the way governments reacted to the pandemic in general and, specifically, in how they supported – or didn’t – the cultural sector. That set me thinking more about connections between the sector and national governments; about where the arts and culture sit in the thinking and policy mapping of governments in different countries.

One answer lies simply in where culture sits in the daily lives and priorities of the people – on a spectrum from instinctive engagement to places where the cultural candle burns less brightly. And on another spectrum, from countries which cherish their classical cultures to those where engagement is more with vernacular and popular cultures – lived cultures of today rather than an admired canon often going back centuries.

The spectrum of governmental organisation

But, as I studied the way governments recognised the catastrophic depth of Covid’s impact on the arts, I became ever more fascinated by a quite different spectrum – that of governmental organisation.

In the government of most developed countries, there is a core of the most central policy areas where whole ministries are devoted to single subjects.  Typically areas like Finance, Defence, Foreign relationships and Diplomacy, Health, Education, and sometimes the Environment, Transport and Energy are regarded as so sui generis that whole ministries are singularly responsible for those aspects of public policy and management.

Looking around the world, three broad patterns emerge: some countries have those kinds of standalone ministries devoted to culture; in others culture is bundled with other portfolios; and some (like the US) culture has no seat at the government table. 

Countries with Culture Ministries that are singular in the same way as other departments of state include France, Denmark and Russia among others. Sweden’s Ministry of Culture has some overlapping coordination with Education and Research; in India the Ministry of Culture often connects with the Ministries of Tourism and Education, and Japan has an Agency for Cultural Affairs, but it comes under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

But in many countries, responsibility for Culture is combined with responsibility for other areas – like Education, Sport, Tourism, Science, Innovation, Media, Youth, Heritage, and Education among many others. Australia, for example, has a Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, and in Indonesia one ministry embraces culture, education, research & technology. Germany has a Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and the media are also included in the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. And there are many more portfolio combinations across the world.

The United States is one of few countries where the arts, artists and culture have no voice at the cabinet table. Instead, cultural issues are divided among various agencies and programmes like the US Information Agency which promoted US culture and values abroad from the 1950s until its functions were absorbed by the Department of State in 1999. Today, the State Department’s Bureau of (International) Educational and Cultural Affairs handles cultural exchange programmes.

The US’s proportionately tiny federal grant giving and investment programmes are delegated to the National Endowment for the Arts, the independent agency that invests in “artistic excellence and cultural engagement across the nation”, which has suffered swingeing cuts from the present administration.

Does it matter?

These are not arbitrary administrative decisions. Where culture is linked with education you often get a stronger cultural focus on heritage, the arts curriculum and arts access work. When it is paired with tourism or sport, there can be a tilt toward festivals, mega-events, spectacle and economic return.

Ministries that combine the arts with media or heritage often lean towards identity-building and the creative industries. For arts leaders, these structures shape not only who picks up the phone when you call government, but also whether your work is framed as education, heritage, industry – or simply as art.

It would be too simplistic to say countries with standalone ministries for the arts and culture always see the world through arts-for-arts’-sake lenses. However, they do often see the arts in their own terms rather than as also adding value to society in other ways – as Canada’s Hill Strategies Research analysed at the same time as the ACE chair Peter Bazalgette was making the same case in 2013.

It has been interesting to look at cultural policies around the world on the basis of how their culture ministries are structured and organised, but the next step could be even more revealing. Applying the same kind of analysis to sub-regional and city governments could show how these different emphases and connections play out at a more granular level than the inevitably generalised national stage. It could explain much of the regional and city planning that does so much to define the way culture is – or isn’t – woven through the urban fabric. 

A lifetime ago, as head of arts for Birmingham City Council, I analysed for the European Journal of Cultural Policy (1996) how that kind of ‘virtuous circle connectivity’ was playing out in a single city. As cultural tectonic plates keep shifting in the post-Covid world, these seemingly dry questions of governmental geometry will increasingly determine the health – and perhaps even the survival – of our cultural ecosystems.