"Cultural Policies in Europe” is divided into two section and contains eleven articles, with two being joint interviews. The first half examines the main dynamics and obstacles by focusing on the social history of cultural participation. Making use of activity typologies, this part identifies the sectors involved, non-professional participant profiles, the different contributions made by participants, perceptions of risks and opportunities, and the relationships among the participants, artists, and directors across an enormous variety of multi-level participative projects across European countries and regions, such as PARTIS - Artistic Practices to Social Inclusion by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal; Recetas Urbanas and the artwork Montana Verde in Antwerp, Belgium; Africolor Festival in Seine Saint-Denis, France; or the CULINN seven museums’ project, Denmark. 

 

The second half of the book focuses on participation and territorial development, and highlights participatory democracy and artistic creation as a human and common right. This is followed by an analysis of what music does to nurture participation through adopting a cross-sectoral perspective. The subsequent articles then analyse the re-discovery of cultural democracy in the COVID19 context, and how this crisis might be an opportunity. Finally, the last chapter presents an approach to digital artistic co-creation and participation by cultural institutions and independent professionals in exceptional times, as in the cases of the participatory online production by the Austrian theatre company Nesterval or the hybrid Santarcangelo Festival in Italy, which collected vision of "imagined possible futures". Here, the authors draw our attention to how engagement with online audiences requires access for everyone as well as skills and investment. This underlines the cultural and economic inequalities between European citizens, countries and regions, institutions in urban or rural spaces, and large and small institutions. 

 

 

Based on the results of an exploratory survey and a comparative approach between twelve different countries, the introductory chapter describes some of the main opportunities, obstacles, and criticisms of the participatory trend. On the one hand, participation can contribute to decreasing unequal access to artistic and cultural goods and foster shared decision-making in the interests of communities. On the other hand, the obstacles to participation often stem from the instrumentalization and the rhetorical discourse around participation, which stand in strong contrast to the actual rather low level of participatory practices and the refusal to really share power. Some of the criticisms target the "populism” and "individualism” of participatory projects and bring forward the argument that working with non-professionals leads to a loss in artistic quality and, finally, to "market-oriented” or "demand-oriented” cultural policies.

 

Ultimately, this fosters discussions among different perspectives on what cultural participation is and what its limitations are. While participation is mostly defined as a common right and thus perceived as a method with the potential to open up artistic and cultural production for broader sections of society, there is also the "dark side” of participative projects, which the book’s authors present as disappointments linked to the efforts to broaden engagement through a participative turn in our societies. Researchers continue to observe only modest success of cultural participation and a fail to encounter the desired outcome: the active involvement of citizens. The obstacles to the participatory turn can be easily perceived during observation processes. They show a lack of sharing power and decision-making, and the rhetorical discourse around participation can be seen in cultural participatory experiences all over Europe, influenced by inflexible organisations, inequalities between participants and a lack of diversity in the individuals and groups involved in these experiences. 

 

 

Far from being coherent and territorially generalized, participatory projects tend to mainly deal with personal idiosyncrasies, inflexible models of hierarchical organisations and the incapacity to involve more segments of civil society, let alone other sectors. Furthermore, in the end, the profile of participants in such projects remains the same as that of other cultural audiences. Regular participants in cultural activities and artistic experiences are usually citizens with higher education levels, with more prestigious social origins and better positions in the socio-professional structure. This remains true even for long-term participatory projects run by experienced organizations. 

 

Still, participation constitutes a desired goal of improving public action and emerges as a signal of quality - endowing public decisions with increased legitimacy - and a tool for better public management and decision-making. Achieving this goal requires responsive work and mutual critical and reflective exchanges. Hence, at its core, any discussion on the contemporary participatory turn involves looking at an infinite possibility of collaboration between people of different ages and backgrounds and how individuals can produce different levels of knowledge and involvement as co-creators and participants of decision-making processes. As the book’ authors conclude, more mediation strategies and a critical reflexive path are required to gain insights for better cultural political decision-making by using participation. If only few projects and with lesser levels of participation involve the youngest and most socially vulnerable groups, some segments of the population continue to be left behind and cultural institutions lose out on an essential driver of cultural democracy. Public policies thus need to take this into account when seeking to encourage active cultural participation and more democratic structures. 

 

In the end, this book is of great interest to researchers, cultural managers and decision-makers, teachers and students who wish to learn about the most recent developments in participatory culture and how different public policy paradigms encourage specific visions of the world and thus shape the objectives of participation.