Cultural Policy in 2025: Pressures and Promises in a Divided World
9 December 2025
Elena Polivtseva (lead author), Valentina Montalto, Lina Kirjazovaite
According to global reports and surveys, we are living through one of the most divided periods since the Cold War. Experts identify ‘state-based armed conflict’ as the biggest risk facing humanity today - a jump from eighth place to first in just one year. This perception is not unfounded: there are currently more than 100 armed conflicts underway worldwide. These include Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the civil war in Sudan, among others. Conflicts are also becoming increasingly internationalised, making solutions more difficult.
Just as the world struggles to reverse the decline of global peace, it is also falling short on its commitments to slow climate degradation: the progress of implementing the Paris Agreement remains far too slow: none of the 45 assessed indicators are currently on track to meet their 1.5°C targets by the end of this decade. COP30 offered its strongest rights- and justice-based language yet — but it fell short in the final outcome: adaptation finance remains diluted and pushed to 2035, accountability mechanisms are vague, and the document omits any roadmap for fossil-fuel phase-out — the dominant driver of climate change.
Armed conflict and the climate crisis, compounded by economic instability, continue to drive high levels of forced human displacement, representing a double increase in the past decade. However, for the first time in years, irregular migration and asylum figures in Europe have deviated from global displacement trends, with the number of arrivals decreasing by 40%. This is explained as a consequence of increasingly restrictive migration policies worldwide, that include control, expulsion and border fortifications programmes, as well as the externalisation of asylum processing.
The debate on migration is likely to intensify, as the global political landscape undergoes a profound shift. In 2025, we saw the first consequences of the ‘mega election year’ of 2024 — the largest global election year since the introduction of universal suffrage. Numerous elections strengthened populist and radical anti-establishment parties. The trend of this massive election wave was a widespread voter backlash against parties and leaders that were in power and were voted out of office or saw their support shrink.
Another remarkable trend was the further decline of multilateralism, coming with sweeping reductions to international aid — from USAID’s dismantling to sharp cuts across Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands — signalling a broader inward-looking trend and a retreat from global cooperation at a time of rising instability. While cultural spending never represented a significant share of these funds, the cuts are destabilising NGOs, foundations, and the cultural sector itself — not to mention the signal this sends to international partners.
The world of cultural policy has also been far from static. Over the past year, we have witnessed important developments: the adoption of the Mondiacult 2025 Outcome Document, ongoing debates about the EU’s future budget and the new architecture for cultural funding, and the release of the EU’s long-awaited strategic framework for culture. At the same time, national cultural policies continue to shift — in some countries becoming more conservative or market-driven, while in others moving decisively toward cultural rights and improved working conditions for artists, going as far as promoting basic income for artists.
Culture as an SDG: an answer to the wrong question?
In October 2025, UNESCO and the Ministry of Culture held the Mondiacult 2025 Conference, which resulted in the adoption of a new Mondiacult declaration, officially called a ‘Culture Minister’s Commitment’. Compared with its predecessor — the 2022 Mondiacult Declaration — this year’s document places a stronger emphasis on culture’s role in promoting peace, uses the word crisis twice as often, and drops the 2022 call for Member States to increase public budgets for culture.
Crucially, the demand to embed culture as an ‘independent goal in its own right’ in future United Nations development frameworks remains as explicit in the 2025 Outcome Document as it was three years ago. This UNESCO's continued push is widely celebrated and supported by the cultural sector. Yet resistance from beyond culture policy circles remains strong, as the last decade has shown, despite sustained advocacy efforts. This resistance culminated last year in the removal of the ‘culture goal’ from the final text of the UN’s Pact for the Future.
But as Justin O’Connor noted, ‘there’s a dire prospect not just of no cultural goal, but maybe no goals at all’. Amid a waning US commitment to the SDGs and reduction of their development funding, a trend echoed by several other Western countries, the prospect of renewing the SDG framework in five years looks increasingly doubtful. Moreover, the framework itself has not delivered a transformative shift towards sustainability. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 delivers a sobering verdict: only 18 percent of SDG targets are on track to be achieved by 2030. As the UN Secretary-General put it, ‘the world is getting a failing grade’.
So, the question of whether we really need a culture goal is not that irrelevant. If the cultural sector is truly the driver of imagination it claims to be, perhaps our task at this moment in history is to rethink the very idea of sustainable development, freeing it from an ever-expanding list of indicators and anchoring it instead in a bolder, clearer vision. A vision that recognises the global inequities and does not continue to pair the economic growth, in its classical conception, with the very things it undermines, such as environmental sustainability.
Shrinking space for democracy: what role for culture?
Another major concern today is the state of democracy worldwide, which has been in steady decline for more than a decade. The last edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index points to an ongoing democratic degradation that began around 2007 and shows no sign of reversing. According to other global reporting, for the first time in 20 years, autocracies now outnumber democracies.
This crisis is not ignored at the EU level. Protecting democracy features among the European Union’s new strategic priorities for 2024–2029, alongside economic competitiveness and security. In her 2025 State of the Union speech, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that democracy is ‘under attack’. The pressures on democracy in Europe are visible not only in statements and strategies. One of the most alarming developments for civil society in 2025 is a political campaign led by the European People’s Party (EPP) and backed by far-right groups in the European Parliament, targeting civil society organisations, working on issues of environment, human rights, and others. Notably, in June 2025, the Parliament voted to establish a Scrutiny Working Group on NGO financing within the Budgetary Control Committee, specifically tasked with investigating EU funding to NGOs. As civil society organisations argue, the problem with this initiative is that it applies selective scrutiny to the NGO sector compared with the business sector, and promotes a ‘misleading narrative’.
As democratic erosion becomes more openly acknowledged in Europe, the role of culture in responding to it is also gaining recognition. Over recent years, from EU-commissioned studies to the EU Work Plan for Culture’s exploration of the ‘culture and democracy’ theme, this relationship has steadily moved up the agenda. In November, this convergence culminated in a joint declaration, signed by all EU member states except Hungary, as well as Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and Ukraine, entitled Declaration on the necessity of culture and media as a safeguard for our European democracies. The document, infused with a sense of urgency and even existential concern, shifts the narrative from discussing the role or value of culture to asserting its necessity. It is also one of the first EU texts to clearly articulate the interlinked triangle of culture, democracy, and security: Europe’s security depends on the resilience of its democratic values and identity, and ‘heritage and cultural diversity are woven into the fabric of this identity’.
The freshly adopted EU’s strategic framework for culture, the Culture Compass, acknowledges culture’s democratic value and outlines initiatives to improve access to culture, especially for young people. It also refers to the newly launched European Democracy Shield as a mechanism to promote and protect democracy, recognising artistic freedom as ‘a relevant part’ of this effort. The Shield, in turn, refers to the Culture Compass when touching upon artistic freedom. So, it is not yet entirely clear how the two frameworks will meaningfully work together to drive the integration of artistic freedom as a pillar of democratic resilience.
A key institutional development in linking culture with democratic priorities is the proposal to merge Creative Europe with the CERV Programme (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) within the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2028–2034), as part of a new funding instrument, AgoraEU. The programme is framed largely around EU values and democratic resilience, highlighting culture’s importance for identity, participation, citizenship, equality, and non-discrimination. In contrast, culture’s economic role receives less focus than in the existing Creative Europe regulation.
A positive development is that AgoraEU foresees a doubling of the funding envelopes for both the Culture and Media strands. Yet, many in the sector are concerned about the political and financial implications of merging cultural funding with broader civil society support. Will culture retain its autonomous political space at the EU level and be valued in its own right? Can this new configuration actually strengthen the cultural-democracy nexus, making culture more visible rather than overshadowed by other sectors? For example, while the European Democracy Shield mentions AgoraEU as a key tool for implementation, it does not reference the Creative Europe strand at all, focusing instead on journalism, news media, and civil society actors within the CERV+ and Media+ strands. Does this new strategy actually recognise the value of culture for democracy?
Furthermore, combining cultural policy — a domain that is already politically fragile — with another policy area risks weakening it even more. In simple terms, when culture must compete within a shared budget, it becomes more susceptible to cuts whenever political priorities shift, compared to having its own dedicated funding line.
And this leads to the not-so-good news. A key change in the new MFF is the introduction of greater flexibility, presented as a solution to the rigidity of previous funding rules, particularly during crises. The Commission President has made flexible budget allocation a top priority. In practice, this means that budget decisions, including shifting funds between priorities, will be taken annually through implementing acts by the European Commission. Because Creative Europe will no longer stand alone but function as a strand within AgoraEU, its funding could be more easily redirected whenever political attention moves elsewhere. This new annual flexibility mechanism also heightens the potential for competition between the various components of AgoraEU.
It, therefore, remains to be seen whether this integration of two policy fields, combined with enhanced financial flexibility, will genuinely strengthen the link between culture and democracy in a way that allows culture to flourish, or whether it will dilute culture’s autonomous space and weaken its political footing.
Freedom and sustainability of the cultural sector - what’s at stake?
In early 2025, all 27 Ministers of Culture signed a letter calling on the European Commission to preserve funding for culture. The letter, invoking the values of cultural diversity and artistic freedom, was both to the point - highlighting what truly matters for the sector - and, at the same time, existentially urgent. Its release came as a surprise to some of us, as the general context of cultural policies shaped by national policymakers has not been particularly supportive in the last couple of years. And this was the trend beyond the EU as well.
Indeed, there have been a growing number of signs of shrinking space for artistic freedom worldwide. In Slovakia, as reported by the sector, recent legislative amendments have further weakened transparency in the appointment and dismissal of directors of cultural institutions, abolished public hearings, and expanded ministerial control over the arms-length bodies.
The Israeli-Gaza war has also affected freedom of expression in some countries, as Freemuse reports, most notably in Germany, the USA, and the UK, with visual arts most affected, followed by literature, music, and film, particularly works involving pro-Palestine public positions. In Serbia, the board of the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) rejected the 59th edition programme proposed by its artistic direction and blocked Swiss director Milo Rau from participating. This decision follows controversy surrounding Rau’s 2024 speech at BITEF, in which he criticised environmentally damaging lithium-mining plans in Serbia. In the USA, shortly after the start of his second presidential term, Donald Trump issued several orders targeting ideologies related to equity and gender identity, combined with the cancellation of several National Endowment for the Arts grants. These examples are just a few among many, with even harsher cases of arrests and violence against artists occurring worldwide.
Artistic freedom has not only suffered from direct attacks but also from shrinking public support for the arts. With many European countries facing budget deficits and a reshuffling of priorities, particularly with defense concerns rising, public funding for culture has been cut in several countries, including France, Finland, Germany (with significant reductions in Berlin), Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and others.
The overall fragility of the culture portfolio has been further highlighted by discussions about eliminating specific culture departments or ministries within governments, such as in the UK and Belgium, as well as the risks of transferring responsibility for cultural policy to politicians who are uninterested in safeguarding the independence of the arts, as seen in Czechia, or those lacking expertise or genuine care for culture, as seen in Lithuania.
However, the landscape is far from black-and-white. Several bold developments have taken place in different countries, both recognising the challenges the sector faces and promoting new paradigms in support and policy. In the Netherlands, the Cultural Council established a Committee on Artistic Freedom to investigate the state of artistic expression, focusing on self-censorship and preparing recommendations for the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, as well as the Houses of Representatives and the Senate. Denmark has adopted a new Culture Pass for young people, and Ireland has announced the transition of the Basic Income Scheme for Artists from pilot to permanent status. In Cyprus, the government has introduced a new law establishing an Artists’ Registry and an Artists’ Association Registry, alongside an Artist Grant scheme.
Perhaps one of the most interesting and promising developments is Spain’s adoption of a new Cultural Rights Plan, which not only recognises the systemic nature of cultural rights but also strengthens them through additional financial support. This plan includes investments in various aid programmes, including new calls for cultural projects with a special social impact, support for professional associations and unions, and cooperation programmes in rural areas.
The long-term impact of both negative and positive trends remains to be seen, particularly in cross-border dynamics - namely, how best practices travel between countries and how shrinking spaces for freedom either undermine or, paradoxically, strengthen awareness about freedoms elsewhere.
AI: collisions, betrayals, crossroads
This year has been eventful in terms of AI developments and the attempts to regulate it and establish a balanced, non-threatening relationship with the creative sectors. To begin with, a remarkable, though somewhat unsurprising, development has been the expanding flood of AI-generated content online. According to Deezer, a global music streaming platform, they receive over 30,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, accounting for more than 28% of total daily uploads identified by their AI detector. This figure has grown from 10% at the start of the year. Meanwhile, other platforms such as YouTube and Spotify continue to host large amounts of AI-generated content. Listeners tend to either not distinguish this content or consciously embrace it if it resonates with them.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, too, the first half of 2025 also saw developments across many ongoing copyright lawsuits against AI companies. Governments, meanwhile, continue to grapple with their role in balancing the needs of creatives, culture consumers, and businesses.
The European Union’s AI Act, the first law of its kind in the world, came into force in August 2024. It was initially welcomed by cultural and creative sectors, but by mid-2025, however, that optimism had faded. In July, more than 40 European creative industry associations representing right-holders issued a joint statement calling the AI Act’s implementation a ‘betrayal’. The controversy centred on Article 53 of the Act, designed to ‘facilitate holders of copyright and related rights to exercise and enforce their rights under Union law’. However, creative industries argued that the General Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice, published in July 2025, does not achieve a ‘fair and workable balance’, and that the template for disclosure of training data fails to provide sufficient transparency about the majority of copyrighted works used to train AI systems. The issues of unremunerated creative labour already exploited by AI companies and the practical impossibility of opting out remain critical concerns.
Meanwhile, the United States has been advancing legislation to further define authorship and copyright in the age of AI. In March 2025, the US Court of Appeals issued a landmark ruling denying copyright protection for AI-generated works, reinforcing the requirement of human authorship. The ruling distinguishes between works created entirely by AI, which are unprotected, and works in which AI assists human creativity, which can be subject to copyright, yet it leaves significant grey areas regarding where exactly that line falls. This uncertainty creates new doubts for artists who have already integrated AI-assisted tools into their practices.
China has taken a different regulatory approach. In March, the Cyberspace Administration released the Measures for Labelling Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content and a mandatory national standard. These rules require social media platforms, video-sharing platforms, and news portals to verify whether file metadata contains implicit labels indicating AI-generated content. When content is identified as AI-generated, providers must inform the public by adding labels. Creators of AI-generated content must also add both implicit and explicit labels.
EU’s new cultural strategy: a new era or status quo?
Another crucial milestone has been the publication of the European Commission’s Culture Compass, its new long-term strategic framework for culture. With the motto ‘Europe for Culture, Culture for Europe’, the strategy signals an intention to balance two policy approaches: valuing culture for various other policy missions, on the one hand, and the strengthening of the cultural ecosystem itself, recognising its diverse challenges and pressures - on the other.
The discourse of the strategy is ambitious and thoughtful, which is uplifting and encouraging, and even surprising, in these times of polarisation, division, and uncertainty. The Compass articulates the multifaceted values of culture - going beyond economics and jobs, places artistic freedom at its core, and acknowledges the difficulties inherent in artistic careers. Cultural diversity is celebrated as one of the EU’s great assets, and is to be ‘continuously reimagined’. The Compass notes that ‘culture’s strategic importance for Europe is underestimated’ and sets the ambition to embed culture as a ‘key dimension within all relevant strategies and policies’. These commitments were not explicitly stated - if present at all - in the EU’s previous cultural strategies.
While, of course, many elements are missing from this strategy, and some of those included sit uneasily together (for example, the promotion of creative industries alongside the notion of culture as a ‘public good’), the greatest reason for raised eyebrows is a modest shift from the status quo when it comes to the how. Much of the document lists the continuation or renewal of existing measures, proposes soft instruments such as guidelines, strategies, and charters, and offers narrowly targeted or partial responses to major structural challenges.
For instance, when it comes to the global positioning of Europe - one of the most critical focus points of today, the Compass refers to the EU’s leadership in culture and creativity, yet it does not propose any bold measures and financial guarantees to make this a reality; nor does it feature any clear ambition to develop a long-term architecture for international cultural cooperation. What the EU’s cultural leadership in the world actually means remains open for (urgent) discussion - especially at a time when the United States, in its National Security Strategy (2025), advances its own notion of ‘European Greatness’, explicitly challenging the idea of European unity and calling for ‘unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history’.
So, how should we understand the Culture Compass? Surely as an important agenda-setter and boundary-pusher in terms of discourse and the recognition of what culture means for Europe - and what Europe must urgently do for culture. This new political commitment is crucial because, like any strategic document, it opens the door to future policy shifts. Culture advocates and policymakers now have an additional toolbox to use in promoting real change in the years ahead - even beyond the 20 Compass flagship initiatives already proposed by the Commission. It is a matter of identifying the essentials and activating our political imagination about how these commitments can translate into a better reality for culture.
The Compass must become a pathway for change, while not necessarily making a revolution today. However, it is not unreasonable for those of us in the cultural sector to be impatient for concrete and bold steps forward, and yes, to be disappointed with the lack of them in the Compass — especially in a context of intensifying political discourse around crisis and urgency, and in light of the genuine pressures shaking the cultural field.
What is also somewhat disappointing is that the Culture Compass does not offer a clearly articulated vision of culture’s relationship with the economy. While the cultural sector has long absorbed neoliberal economic principles, it has neither managed to explain its own economic functioning nor to influence the emergence of a new economic order — one grounded in social and solidarity-based principles — that is taking shape elsewhere. How is it that culture has adapted to neoliberal norms without ever gaining a real seat at the decision-making table, and now even risks being sidelined within Social and Solidarity Economy agendas? The industrial economy and the social economy operate according to fundamentally different logics and therefore require distinct policy approaches. As long as this distinction remains blurred, our objectives will lack clarity, our expected impacts will be confused, and frustration will persist.
Local cultural policy: a space for a new cultural narrative?
Understanding what is happening in cities is not secondary to what happens at the national level. Not only because local governments are the closest ones to citizens’ needs, but also because in many countries they are the main funders of cultural services.
This year, EU policymakers have once again reaffirmed the crucial role of culture in revitalising cities and regions - a role now demonstrated by countless places where culture has become a core part of the ‘development equation’. Outlining the European Commission’s vision for prosperous urban futures, the EU Agenda for Cities recognises that culture can help cities navigate today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, from job creation to competitiveness and wellbeing.
This policy momentum also reflects an emergent reorientation: while culture has traditionally been valued for making territories more vibrant, visible, and attractive, thus supporting local economies and tourism, emerging strategic priorities are beginning to move beyond this economic lens.
While a gradual but discernible transition towards a more multifaceted understanding of the value of culture in local policy-making is clearly underway, the ‘culture and economy’ topic has not vanished either. A few cities have been able to clearly identify and build upon the cultural and creative sectors in which they have a real know-how (for example, Antwerp keeps the title of major commercial and creative fashion capital), and others are trying to get there (Faenza - a UNESCO Creative City since this year - with ceramics; or Birmingham with jewellery - a World Craft City since 2025). Greater Manchester has just released its Creative Industries Development Plan, which not only revolves around a very clear industrial policy for the sector, but also plans to establish a novel Creative Council and Freelance Taskforce.
Yet there remains an urgent need to understand what the cultural economy is actually about. A key challenge is that, unlike in most other sectors where the industrial and social economies operate separately, in culture the two not only coexist but are deeply interdependent. Added to this is the fact that both spheres often rely on a highly fragmented ecosystem of independent cultural and creative professionals. It is no coincidence that a major creative capital like New York City has recently endorsed a proposal to introduce a 50% levy on music streaming subscriptions to support musicians. The attention to artists’ working conditions, brought to the forefront by the COVID-19 pandemic, is here to stay. Regardless of which cultural narrative becomes central in future debates, improving artists’ working conditions is likely to remain a key pathway for supporting a sector that - unlike many others - rests on a fragile balance among highly diverse groups of actors.
Towards 2026: Where will the real progress come from?
As always - time matters. Look at how far the lag between AI development and legislative or political action has brought us: AI has penetrated every field of public life, and in just a few years, it has made the future without itself almost unimaginable. As governments search for solutions and civil society promotes debates, AI has already transformed creative processes and stolen large amounts of creative work (and is doing so right now as we speak). These are concrete shifts that become ever harder to reverse over time.
Another problem with these lags is that when symbolic commitments grow louder while reality deteriorates and lacks bold measures, trust between citizens and policymakers erodes. It is simply not possible to celebrate strategies for too long amidst decreasing ecosystems. It is not quite right to promote culture as a democratic force while artistic freedom is under attack and self-censorship grows within the sector - driven by many factors, including funding scarcity, polarisation, and discriminatory policies. Leaving political statements without elaboration for too long can also lead to missed opportunities.
Look at the concept of ‘culture as a public good’, proposed by UNESCO in its Mondiacult Declaration three years ago. It has since been included in several political frameworks, including the Culture Compass and earlier EU statements, and was reaffirmed in this year’s Mondiacult document. As an idea, it is ambitious: to treat culture as a resource belonging to everyone, something the state must protect and provide to all citizens, regardless of market dynamics. Yet, despite its widespread use in political and policy discourse, it has not led to any meaningful transformation in practice, and often appears alongside a more conventional industrial lens on culture’s value.
As regards the still controversial economic dimension, a novel conceptual framework is urgently needed – one that does not remain on academics’ desks and that critically engages with what has been produced in academia and beyond. There are interesting attempts out there that could ultimately lead to a new way to frame and enact the cultural economy, from those referring to the need to make a major shift in cultural economics by switching from a supply-side (art for art’s sake) to a demand-site approach (culture is what people need), to attempts to distinguish between commercial and solidarity types of cultural activities. These are somewhat mirrored by attempts to develop a novel generation of cultural policy measures – notably the national cultural pass schemes for young people that the Culture Compass wants to better connect – as well as by the increasing adoption of national social economy plans, like the one just adopted in Italy.
We do hope that a year from now, at the end of 2026, we will be talking about concrete and workable shifts happening across the world: national and EU culture budget truly on a path toward significant and secure growth; the AI debate genuinely incorporating the voices and needs of creatives; the Culture Compass leading to the bold steps that are needed; some progress seen in reimagining the role of culture in sustainable development, and artistic freedom and ‘culture as a public good’ entering honest and substantive policy discussions that finally deliver long-awaited protections and recognition.
