Culture policy is easy to support in principle and difficult to design in practice. Almost everyone agrees culture matters — for identity, community, education and economy. What is harder is deciding who gets to define what culture policy should achieve, and whose culture it should support. UNESCO’s MONDIACULT declaration presents culture as a global public good and argues for its place in development policy. The declaration is a framework; the hard questions are about power.
Why culture is hard to govern
Culture resists the categories that policy usually relies on. It runs through many sectors at once, which is why it does not sit in one the way agriculture or transport do. It is produced by both professionals and amateurs, in markets and outside them. Its value is partly economic and largely not. These features make culture easy to invoke and difficult to operationalise, which is why cultural policy often ends up as a set of funding programmes rather than a coherent strategy.
Who decides
Every culture policy answers, implicitly, the question of who decides. Governments, funding bodies, large cultural institutions, private platforms and communities all shape what is supported and what is seen. The balance between them determines whose culture is amplified and whose is marginalised. A policy that consults only established institutions will tend to reinforce existing hierarchies, however well intentioned its language.
The economic argument and its limits
Culture is frequently justified through its economic contribution: creative industries, tourism, jobs. The argument is real, and it can distort. When cultural value is measured only by its market output, activities that matter but do not sell — community practice, minority languages, amateur traditions — are undervalued and underfunded. The economic case should be one argument among several, not the only one that counts.
The public-good framing
Calling culture a global public good shifts the conversation. It suggests that culture benefits everyone, that markets alone will under-provide it, and that it deserves protection as a shared inheritance rather than a private asset. That framing supports public investment, but it also raises questions: who is included in the public, and who decides what counts as heritage worth preserving? A public-good claim can be used to broaden access or to entrench a particular version of national culture.
Digital platforms and cultural gatekeeping
Increasingly, the gatekeepers of culture are recommendation algorithms. What people discover is shaped by platforms whose priorities are engagement and revenue, not cultural diversity. This shifts power away from ministries and towards companies that are not accountable to cultural policy. Any contemporary culture policy has to reckon with this, because a funding programme can support a thousand artists while an algorithm decides that almost no one will encounter their work.
Participation and representation
A recurring theme in international frameworks is participation: cultural policy should involve the people it affects, including minorities, indigenous peoples and marginalised communities. Participation is easy to declare and hard to do well. It requires resources, time and a willingness to share decision-making power, which is precisely what institutions are reluctant to give up. Where participation is tokenistic, it can deepen distrust rather than build it.
Measuring what culture policy achieves
If the goal is more than counting events and grants, measurement has to capture access, participation and diversity, not just output. Who attends, who is funded, which languages and traditions are represented? These questions require data that many cultural agencies do not routinely collect. The absence of such data is itself a policy choice, because it makes certain outcomes invisible.
What a better process looks like
A culture policy that takes these tensions seriously would set explicit goals about access and diversity, fund the less marketable as well as the commercial, build participation into decision-making rather than consultation, and collect data on who benefits. None of this resolves the underlying question of who decides, but it makes the answer more visible and more contestable — which is what democratic cultural policy requires.
Cultural rights and minorities
Cultural policy intersects directly with human rights. International law recognises the right to participate in cultural life and the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples to enjoy and develop their own cultures. In practice, cultural funding often flows to majority traditions and national institutions, leaving minority cultures to compete for what remains. A rights-based approach would treat support for diverse cultural expression as an obligation rather than a discretionary grant. That reframing matters, because it shifts the question from whether a minority culture is commercially viable to whether its members can practise it at all.
Public media and cultural diversity
Public-service media is one of the few levers a government can use to support cultural diversity without directing it. A well-funded public broadcaster can commission work in minority languages, cover regional cultures and provide a platform that commercial media, chasing mass audiences, will not. Where public media is weakened or politicised, that space shrinks and cultural production gravitates toward whatever the largest market rewards. Protecting the independence of public media is therefore also a cultural policy question, not only a journalistic one.
Where this comes from
- UNESCO. MONDIACULT 2022 Declaration. unesco.org
- UNESCO. Culture. unesco.org
Image: Maximilien Luce · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons.