How can cultural policy strengthen the arts and cultural sector?

During the COVID-19 worldwide health pandemic, with gigs cancelled, seasons postponed, travel ceased and unemployment increasing, calls for new approaches to cultural policy have emerged despite there being no shared understanding of what cultural policy is, does and could be. Governments in Australia and New Zealand have responded to the sector’s increased precarity with large-scale rescue funding packages, which are focussed on immediate relief and short-term survival. Even pre-COVID, it seems there was little interest in longer term cultural policy thinking.

This research explores the legitimacy of cultural policy as source of sector sustainability through a review of contemporary cultural policy literature and insights from key players in the cultural policy space - arts and cultural bureaucrats, whose perspectives are usually muted. Norwegian sociologist Per Mangset (2020) suggests that western democracies may actually be facing the end of cultural policy, which has not adapted or responded significantly to major societal, economic and cultural changes of the last 50 years. While not conceding that cultural policy is a redundant practice, this research responds to Mangset’s provocation by identifying three key policy approaches through a survey of contemporary policy literature. The three approaches; policy as action, policy as sustainability and policy as democracy intersect to create a grey area in which new democratic approaches to policy development might be further explored.

This contribution to the contemporary cultural policy heritage narrative of the trans-Tasman region clarifies definitions and approaches utilised by policy makers in Australian and New Zealand government settings. It finds that cultural policy has been looping in a neo-liberal, post-democratic pattern of short-term cycles resulting in a cultural policy stasis and elitist decision making, which largely excludes the public. Recommendations for further research include exploration of new democratic approaches to cultural policy that could transform policy making to encompass multiple systems and perspectives that can strengthen the arts and cultural sector.