Culture is gaining presence in political discourse on the condition that it demonstrates utility for other purposes. Cohesion, health, innovation, competitiveness, territorial regeneration, or external projection provide a basis for defending public resources. They also establish a price: that which does not promise a recognisable effect remains in a more precarious position. The problem does not lie in culture producing social consequences. It emerges when those consequences become a prerequisite for legitimacy and funding.
An increasingly broad mandate
The European Commission published A Culture Compass for Europe, COM(2025) 785, on 12 November 2025. The document presents culture as a foundation for values and belonging, but also as a source of cohesion, resilience, well-being, innovation, employment, tourism, and international power. Its four directions combine cultural rights and working conditions with a competitive, cohesive Europe that is present in its external relations.
Breadth offers opportunities. It integrates culture into policies that previously treated it as ornamental expenditure and acknowledges that the conditions of artists cannot be separated from cultural access. At the same time, it accumulates expectations upon every intervention that no isolated project can satisfy. A work, a residency, or an archive is compelled to speak several administrative languages simultaneously.
The working document accompanying the Compass also acknowledges the intrinsic value of culture and its status as a public good. This inclusion avoids reducing all European policy to instrumental benefits. However, the tension persists: the abstract recognition of intrinsic value coexists with funding systems that require verifiable objectives, timelines, indicators, and attributable results.
In Spain, the 2026 call for cultural projects of special social impact allocated 5,149,000 euros to initiatives aimed at producing significant transformations through culture. Its objectives include the participation of individuals facing barriers, transversality with other public services, the capacity for civic action, and the articulation of the cultural fabric. These are legitimate objectives. The question is what type of practice is favoured when access to resources depends on anticipating such an effect and narrating it in an evaluable form.
The 2025–2027 Cultural Rights Plan partially shifts the framework. It allows for questioning who may access, create, decide, and receive support without requiring that every instance of participation also produce an economic or health improvement. However, the vocabulary of rights only acquires force when it is translated into budget, obligations, institutional capacity, and public evaluation. A plan cannot be judged by its intentions before its execution is known.
The AgoraEU proposal for the next European financial framework brings together culture, media, citizenship, and values into a single instrument still subject to processing. The Commission presented it on 16 July 2025 with an endowment of 8,582 million euros for 2028–2034, divided into three chapters: approximately 1,796 million for Creative Europe – Culture, approximately 3,194 million for MEDIA+, and approximately 3,593 million for the citizenship, equality, rights, and values chapter. In the 2021–2027 period, culture and media totalled 2,442 million. The European Parliament proposed in its interim report on the financial framework to increase AgoraEU to 10,720 million; the final figure depends on the negotiation of the financial framework.
Two details from the file are relevant to this text. The first is its location: AgoraEU appears under the budgetary heading "Competitiveness, prosperity and security". The second comes from the European Court of Auditors, which in its Opinion 11/2026 on the proposal observed that neither the current legislation nor the proposal defines the European added value that the programme is intended to produce. In my view, both points illustrate the same tension that runs through this article: more funding for culture, placed in a category that measures it by its contribution to something else, and with a criterion for success that remains undefined. Integration may reinforce the political weight of culture or increase competition between very different objectives. The outcome will depend on its final criteria and indicators, not merely on the programme's name or the size of the endowment.
What indicators see well
Evaluation systems easily record participants, activities, partnerships, visits, territorial reach, surveys, and products. This is necessary information. Without it, it is difficult to monitor how funds are utilised, compare commitments with results, or detect persistent exclusions.
The problem begins when the measurable replaces the important. There are effects that take years, depend on many factors, or cannot be attributed to a single intervention. An exhibition may change a curatorial criterion without increasing visitor numbers. A community process may make a conflict visible and reduce, rather than expand, consensus. Research may fail in its initial objective and produce a useful method. A work may sustain a question whose function is to prevent premature closure.
These effects are not necessarily better than quantifiable ones. Nor should they become a romantic excuse against accountability. They require another form of evidence: modified decisions, documents, procedural changes, recorded disagreements, redistributed resources, and continuing relationships.
A short genealogy of impact
The demand for impact has a history. In 1997, François Matarasso published Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts, a study that identified fifty social effects of artistic participation, ranging from personal confidence to community cohesion. The work became a reference point for British cultural policies in the following years. In 2002, Paola Merli criticised it sharply in the International Journal of Cultural Policy: she questioned whether the questionnaires used could support the conclusions and noted that the attributed effects were not compared against any control situation.
The debate did not end with the defeat of one of the parties. In 2019, the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe published a review by Daisy Fancourt and Saoirse Finn on more than three thousand studies concerning the role of the arts in health and well-being. Evidence of effects exists and is robust in some areas. The problem this text raises is not their absence, but what occurs when that evidence becomes a condition for something to be deemed worthy of existence.
Furthermore, there is a distributive question that the discourse of impact often omits. In Culture is Bad for You (2020), Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien, and Mark Taylor documented class inequalities in cultural participation and sector employment in England. If culture produces benefits, those benefits are distributed unequally, and those who participate most are already at an advantage. Measuring average impact may obscure who receives it.
Defensive instrumentalism
Eleonora Belfiore, in an article published in 2012 in Cultural Trends, termed the tendency of the British cultural sector to justify funding through economic and social benefits "defensive instrumentalism". The strategy appeared pragmatic: speaking the language that administrations understood in order to protect vulnerable budgets. Its cost was the acceptance that culture must demonstrate its utility in terms defined outside of itself.
The Cultural Value Project directed by Geoffrey Crossick and Patrycja Kaszynska proposed starting from the experience of the arts and culture and subsequently studying how it relates to broader effects. The order matters. If the evaluation begins with an external result, it only sees from the experience that which can contribute to it. If it begins with what occurs in practice, it can describe consequences that were not foreseen and are not always positive.
In the daily life of funding, research is translated as innovation; a residency, as internationalisation; an archive, as digital transformation. Translating is not falsifying. Projects exist within policies and must explain why they deserve resources. The distortion appears when the fundable vocabulary modifies the project until the required result becomes its raison d'être.
The burden is not distributed equally, either. A large institution possesses dedicated staff for evaluation, communication, and fundraising. A small collective must perform the work, justify it, collect data, and draft the narrative of its impact. An obligation intended to democratise access may favour those who already possess the infrastructure to demonstrate that they merit support.
The risk of promising causality
Speaking of impact suggests a causal relationship. However, many projects can only demonstrate contribution. That an individual participates in an activity and subsequently reports greater well-being does not permit attributing the entirety of the change to that activity. That a neighbourhood receives cultural programming and improves an economic indicator does not prove that the programming is the primary cause, either.
Precision does not weaken the defence of culture. It prevents it from being built upon impossible promises. Evaluations should differentiate between:
- Results directly produced by the project.
- Observed changes to which the project may have contributed.
- Interpretations from participants and professionals.
- Expected effects that did not occur.
- Damages, displacements, or exclusions.
- External factors that prevent the attribution of causality.
When success is demanded, dropouts, conflicts, and adverse consequences disappear from the report. Evaluation ceases to learn and becomes retrospective advertising.
The critique of that rhetoric already appeared in The impact we claim to have. Here, the question is different: what occurs when funding converts impact into a criterion of legitimacy and compels the promise of causalities that the project cannot demonstrate.
Art and the function that does not exhaust it
Public policy requires objectives. It cannot fund without priorities nor decide solely through intuition. Yet a cultural policy that identifies value entirely with an external function funds that which culture shares with other interventions and leaves weakened that which cannot be contracted in advance.
Within the framework of the structural surplus, the artistic event is not defined by lacking a function, but by introducing a difference that said function does not fully reabsorb. A work may contribute to cohesion while simultaneously placing the consensual image of a community in crisis. It may improve the well-being of some individuals and prove uncomfortable for others. It may achieve an educational objective and produce questions that the programme had not foreseen.
That remainder is not a luxury added after fulfilling the purpose. It is what prevents art from being reduced to an interchangeable social technology. If only the contracted effect counts, a cultural activity is valuable only as long as it proves more efficient than another tool intended for the same objective. Its legitimacy remains subordinate to a competition it may lose.
Evaluating without domesticating
Renouncing evaluation would protect, above all, those who already possess prestige. The alternative is to broaden the field of the evaluable and distinguish responsibility from obedience to the indicator.
A project report should record, in addition to participation and execution:
- Unforeseen changes and conflicts that arose.
- Modified institutional decisions.
- Redistributed resources.
- Relationships that continued afterwards.
- Individuals who declined to participate or withdrew, when this can be known without invading their privacy.
- Unpaid labour utilised by the project.
- Materials and data accumulated by the institution.
- Effects that cannot be attributed solely to the intervention.
- Limitations, damages, and unfulfilled commitments.
- Questions that remain open.
Quantitative indicators remain useful, but they must be accompanied by interpretation and context. Counting is not equivalent to explaining. A participation figure does not show who made decisions, who was paid, who provided the data, or what may have been prevented.
Furthermore, there are three timeframes that should not be confused. Execution verifies whether what was committed to was performed. Immediate evaluation observes access, experiences, and problems. Deferred review identifies relationships, institutional changes, or effects that were not visible when the activity concluded. Requesting everything in the final report favours the rapid and the spectacular.
Cultural rights without mandatory performance
The language of rights offers a partial exit because it does not compel the demonstration of productivity to justify access. Participating in cultural life, creating, expressing oneself, and accessing heritage do not depend on producing cohesion or growth.
Yet rights can become another empty vocabulary if they do not determine who receives resources, what barriers must be eliminated, and who participates in decisions. The change does not consist solely of substituting "impact" for "rights". It consists of accepting that certain public obligations exist even if their benefits cannot be converted into a promise of measurable transformation.
The decisive question is who can create, access, dissent, and remain; who is paid; who retains the materials and the value produced; and who assumes the cost of demonstrating it. A mature cultural policy should fund useful interventions and also research without immediate application, slow processes, contentious works, and practices whose outcome cannot be fixed before beginning.
On the open conversation
This text distinguishes between the objectives declared by policies and their effects, which require execution data. If you work in cultural evaluation or funding and are aware of systems that document conflict, learning, and unforeseen effects without penalising them, you may write to me.
Sources
- European Commission, A Culture Compass for Europe, COM(2025) 785.
- European Commission, Culture Compass working document and consultation.
- Ministry of Culture, 2026 grants for special social impact.
- European Commission, AgoraEU proposal, COM(2025) 550.
- European Parliament, Legislative Observatory, procedure 2025/0550(COD).
- European Court of Auditors, Opinion 11/2026 on AgoraEU.
- Culture Action Europe, breakdown of the Commission's proposal and Parliament's position.
- François Matarasso, Use or Ornament?, Comedia, 1997; Paola Merli, "Evaluating the social impact of participation in arts activities", International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2002. References without verified link.
- Daisy Fancourt and Saoirse Finn, What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?, WHO Europe, 2019. Reference without verified link.
- Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien, and Mark Taylor, Culture is Bad for You, Manchester University Press, 2020. Reference without verified link.
- Cultural Rights Plan.
- Eleonora Belfiore, "Defensive instrumentalism".
- Geoffrey Crossick and Patrycja Kaszynska, Understanding the value of arts & culture.