Fair Practice in an Unfair World: Value, Checklist, or Privilege?
1 April 2026
Elena Polivtseva
At the end of 2025, the European Commission, in its new strategic framework, the Culture Compass for Europe, announced that it will develop an EU Artists’ Charter. This is intended as a tool to set out basic principles, guidance, and commitments for fair working conditions in the cultural sector, and to strengthen accountability — especially among organisations receiving EU cultural funding. Such a charter could bring the arts field onto common ground around what fair practice means and how it can be made a reality through collective commitments.
Similar ‘soft’ law instruments already exist across Europe, such as the Fair Practice Code in the Netherlands, the Juist is Juist initiative in Belgium, the Charter of Ethics for organisations in the cultural sector in Luxembourg, among others. Denmark is currently developing its Fair Practice Culture. Fairness has also long been part of the global conversation, leading to the Fair Culture Charter launched by Germany’s UNESCO Commission in 2024.
Whether formalised in specific documents or not, awareness of fair and unfair practices in the arts has grown significantly across the European cultural sector over the past decade. This growing awareness has equipped artists not only with stronger arguments, but also with the confidence to demand — or at least expect — respect for their work, time, skills, and dignity. It has also encouraged a more explicit articulation of shared principles for how professionals relate to and treat one another within the field.
The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated debates on working conditions in the arts. In some contexts, this has led to new legislative measures; in others, it has at least helped to break long-standing taboos surrounding labour conditions and professional practices in the sector. However, the data shows that artists across Europe are still struggling, and their working conditions remain notoriously unfair [1].
The issue remains complex. It relates to a range of interlinked policy areas, including taxation, social security, cultural funding, education, and equality. The more we discuss fair working conditions in the arts, the more gaps we encounter, such as the lack of systems to monitor, enforce, and adequately fund good practices in the field. So, what does the concept of ‘fair practice’ really add to the debate on artists’ working conditions today? What does a code of charter mean in practice, and how can it be developed and applied with nuance?
Fair Practice: Value-Based Commitment or a Compliance Tool?
While the EU Artists’ Charter is still under development, parts of the sector are already raising difficult questions: how will this become a reality as public funding for culture shrinks? How can a focus on fair practice be sustained in a context of defunding and scarcity? Is there not a clash between two parallel trends — diminishing resources for the arts on the one hand, and a growing insistence on fair relations and conditions within the sector on the other?
An immediate response might be that this depends on whether fairness is understood as a checklist to comply with or as a foundational value. Fair practice can be seen in the same way as kindness, hospitality, or honesty: if we truly share these values, we strive to uphold them both in good times and in more difficult circumstances. While it is true that problematic conditions may influence how we express our values, challenges can also reinforce them and highlight their importance. At the same time, if fair practice is approached as a top-down requirement, it is more likely to be perceived as a burden — something to be worked around or avoided where possible, rather than genuinely embraced.
So, the question for policy-makers aiming to promote fair practice is: how can we approach fairness through policies so that it is embedded and promoted as a value rather than a set of top-down rules? And how can fairness function not as a universal ruler for measuring behaviour, but as an adaptive value that can endure through both good and bad times? What does fair practice look like when resources and supporting systems are lacking? What does fairness even mean in such contexts? If we view fair practice as a value framework, it's clear that the sector should be closely involved in articulating these values. But the question is broader: how can these values live on and be sustained within wider systems that are not always conducive to them?
Fair Practice: Progress or a Signal of Systemic Cracks?
To gain insight into these questions, IETM — International network for contemporary performing arts, decided to turn its gaze to challenging contexts — where fair practices have emerged and sustained themselves bottom-up — not with the support of the wider systems, but in some cases despite the gaps and fractures in these systems. Their recent publication ‘Connecting the Dots: Fair Arts Practice in Contexts’ by Phoo Myat Thwe, Kai Brennert, and Tanlume Enyatseng explored five inspiring practices from South Korea, Cambodia, Malaysia, Chile, and Indonesia. Each unfolds within a highly specific context and embodies different dimensions of fairness — including resource pooling and sharing, collective decisionmaking, radical openness towards neighbourhoods, and more. These practices serve both as responses to gaps and fractures in their environments and as visions of how those gaps might be overcome.
Importantly, these initiatives did not emerge from an abundance of resources, generous funding, or supportive policy frameworks — in many cases, quite the opposite. Nor were they the result of a politically symbolic push for fair practice, such as a government-created charter, or even a bottom-up sector process leading to a collective code of practice. Instead, they arose as responses to concrete challenges, as forms of resilience.
These examples show us that fairness, like solidarity, is a vital concept — but also one signalling urgency and hardship. Innovation in how cultural workers organise themselves and support each other often emerges in response to external gaps, frictions, and shortages. The arts are compelled to seek alternative forms of working and collaborating, particularly when dominant systems are unfair, extractive, or overwhelming. When such initiatives succeed, they can feel like fresh air, a source of hope.
Yet, there is a paradox. Because of their often conflictual relationship with existing systems, these initiatives cannot be fully supported or normalised by those systems until the systems themselves change. As a result, the burden frequently falls on a few initiators, often leading to exhaustion and discontinuity. This path is ultimately unsustainable.
When we speak of solidarity and fairness, we often appeal to values and, typically, to goodwill indirectly. Values, beliefs, commitments, and principles are essential ‘soft infrastructures’ of decent working conditions. But for these soft infrastructures to make a difference, we need the ‘hard infrastructures’ — laws, regulations, policies, and resources. Shared values and symbolic commitments to fair practice — charters, codes, and manifestos — cannot succeed on their own if they are not underpinned by improved systems.
Likewise, without shared values and collective commitment, regulation or a programme risks remaining stuck at the level of implementation, facing dozens of obstacles, and additional resources will not necessarily be used to close fairness gaps. For example, without a commitment to sustainable working models and care for one another, increased arts funding alone is unlikely to result in better working conditions for artists — it will rather be used to reproduce the usual unfair practices and competition. Thus, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ infrastructures of working conditions in the arts cannot function without the other.
Fair-practice innovations are essential to strengthening shared values in the field. But they can also be signals of cracks in the system. Policymakers must support progress on fair practice within the arts community, not only by facilitating dialogue and endorsing codes or charters — though this is vitally important — but also by proactively driving structural change in the wider system, so that fair practice becomes an actual practice, not merely rhetoric.
Fair Practice: Fixed Rules or Living Process?
The arts sector is driven primarily by self-expression and meaning-making, not by the pursuit of wealth or comfort. Numerous studies and basic income experiments demonstrate that artists do not ‘take the money and run’. When given resources with fewer restrictions, they often work more deeply and more intensively, and achieve stronger results [2]. At the same time, tendencies towards self-exploitation — and the exploitation of others — undeniably exist. Addressing these tendencies requires continuous negotiation, awareness-raising, and a collective mind shift.
It's important to recognise that profound, collective shifts in mindset don't occur under conditions of extreme precarity, hasty pressure, short-term timelines, or output-driven funding structures. A code of practice alone, as a set of rules — even if seen as needed exactly in circumstances lacking space and time for dialogue offers little help in such conditions, if a shared ground has not been established. What fair practice truly requires is mutual understanding and trust.
Trust enables the negotiation of implicit expectations, ambiguous accountability, and subtle power dynamics in collective decision-making. Trust enables listening. Listening enables us to understand each other’s needs. And respecting each other’s needs is, in practice, fairness.
The initiatives explored in IETM’s publication ‘Connecting the Dots: Fair Arts Practice in Contexts’ demonstrate that fairness, as such, has not been the final destination for the organisations and collectives that started them. Fair practice is rather a method of working in their specific context — a process of negotiation and collective crafting: testing, adjusting, transforming, experimenting, and conversing. Ultimately, it is a deeply relational concept, shaped by who is involved, the context, and the project's purpose and nature.
Time, value, and collaboration are essential ingredients of fair practice. But the challenge lies precisely in the fact that — as experiments explored in this study show — understandings of time, value, and collaboration differ fundamentally across contexts. When initiating any new project — particularly an international one — organisations must continually ask themselves how a specific activity or collaboration affects their local relationships and fits into their broader ecosystem, and how it affects the local relationships and contexts of all partners involved.
In this reality, the role of the policymaker, ultimately, is not to define the principles of fairness in a top-down manner, but to provide the conditions in which they can be defined and negotiated — where the sector can build trust, relationships, and reciprocity, and collectively decide what fairness means for specific collaborations. This happens through open-ended trajectories, spaces for collective inquiry, and community-building processes — elements that are too often absent from short-term, project-based funding structures focused on outputs, overproduction, and rigid criteria. What we need to learn and practise fairness is trust-based funding processes that allow the field to build the long-term foundations of mutual understanding.
The First Test of Fairness: Who is In and Who is Out?
That said, collectively agreed-upon foundations are still necessary — frameworks for discussing values, understanding one another’s needs, and drawing boundaries. A collective charter can provide such a foundation: a dialogue-builder and a living framework for working together in both difficult and better times. Furthermore, these value frameworks can be complemented with practical implementation tools such as fee structures and calculators, contract models, reporting and monitoring mechanisms, ethics protocols, and more. It is essential, however, to begin at the right end of the story.
Too often, when discussing fair relations in the arts, especially the fair distribution of resources, we focus on how benefits — in their broad definition, including money, space, visibility — and more, are shared among those already part of a project or partnership. Questions of fairness in the arts, however, extend far beyond the distribution of end resources. They are also concerned with how input is shared: whose voices are included, whose artistic vision is listened to, and who is invited to participate in decision-making. One indispensable resource for every partner of an arts collaboration is the right to contribute one’s voice, values, and perspective to the shared work — artistically, socially, and politically. The right to participate in an artistic expression as an equal is as vital as the right to derive tangible benefits from that participation. Being heard, respected, understood, and included is a core aspiration for artists in their creative work.
Yet there are still too many people and communities who have no access to cultural spaces, artistic education, or artistic careers. Too many voices never reach the point at which fair practice in the arts even becomes relevant, because social, economic, historical, and political factors keep them outside the arts altogether. Fair practice for a few who are already inside is not fairness — it is privilege. Any fair practice process must therefore aim not only to improve conditions within the arts but also to make the field itself more accessible to those who are currently underrepresented. These two aspirations are interconnected, but there are also power imbalances, biases, and structural inequalities. Importantly, how can we ensure that fair pay strategies, in the context of tightening resources, do not make the art field even less open?
This is closely linked to other policy areas, including education, equality, migration, social protection, labour, freedom of expression, and more. Any fair practice code or charter must be thoughtfully embedded in this broader context — not to complicate reality, but to understand the root causes of structural problems, to clarify the actual role and agency of art workers within them, and acknowledge all other areas where progress must be made.
Needless to say, these realities change over time. Just consider the rapid rise of AI, the long-term consequences and revelations of the post-pandemic period, or the growing number of displaced artists amid war and conflict. New challenges continually reshape the conditions in which we work and live, and they can also shift priorities within the fair practice realm, requiring adaptations of the codes and charters we develop. While core values may remain foundational, the how and even the why must remain open to rethinking. Fair practice should therefore be understood as an ongoing negotiation, not a fixed destination. Charters and codes must be treated as living documents — discussed again and again to keep the dialogue open, to continue establishing a discourse of fairness, while remaining attuned to changing realities.
Can Fair Practice Work?
So, what can be done at different policy levels?
Ensure that commitments to fair practice are matched with adequate and sustained funding. Fairness cannot be implemented in conditions of chronic scarcity.
Complement fair practice charters and codes with labour protections, social security measures, and enforceable standards across cultural and creative sectors. While these processes move at different speeds, it is necessary to drive progress forward by treating fair practice codes as tools for promotion rather than tokenistic gestures.
Move beyond short-term, output-driven schemes towards funding models that prioritise time, dialogue, and relationship-building. Fairness is born in a context of trust; trust is created through thoughtful, bottom-up processes.
Address structural barriers to access in culture, ensuring that underrepresented voices can enter and shape the field. Understand fairness in the arts not only from the perspective of those who are already in, but also from that of those who are not.
Treat fair practice charters as ‘living’ instruments, both firm in their values and intentions and adaptable to changing realities.
The emergence of fair practice across the arts sector demonstrates a strong, shared commitment to improving working conditions. Yet it also reveals a deeper structural reality: the notion of ‘fairness’, ‘solidarity’, or ‘resilience’ often develops not because systems support them, but because they fail to do so. Bottom-up initiatives demonstrate the value-driven nature of artistic and cultural labour, but they cannot carry the burden of systemic change alone.
The forthcoming EUArtists’ Charter represents an important opportunity. Its impact will depend on whether it is translated into concrete conditions that enable fair practice to take root across diverse contexts, and, essentially, whether it is owned by the sector.
Read IETM’s publication ‘Connecting the Dots: Fair Arts Practice in Contexts’ by Phoo Myat Thwe, Kai Brennert, and Tanlume Enyatseng.
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[1] UNESCO, 2025. Global Report on Cultural Policies: Culture — the Missing SDG
[2] Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Ireland 2023, Basic Income for the Arts Initial Impact Assessment (6-month); Wijngaarden, Y., Berkers, P., Kimenai, F., & Everts, R. (2024). Basic income, post-precarious outcome? How creative workers perceive participating in an experiment with basic income. Cultural Trends, 1–16; Creatives Rebuild New York, Guaranteed Income for Artists: Preliminary Findings.
