Appendix – Guidelines for developing policies to ensure
effective participation in cultural life
I. General guidelines
1. Recognise cultural rights as rights that permit each
person, alone or in community with others, to develop all his or
her abilities to be a thinking and feeling being and all his or
her capacities for creative imagination. Recognise that these rights
are primary needsfor the
entire human species, which is designed to live in society: essential
levers for cultural interchange and intercultural dialogue, cultural
rights are also pillars of the principle of “living together” within
society, thanks to common cultural and artistic references that
provide access to all the humanist values handed down in democratic,
liberal societies.
2. Affirm the right of everyone to take part in cultural life
as the right that encapsulates the full set of cultural rights for,
if properly guaranteed, it will pave the way for equal access for
all to national and international cultural resources and the right
to participate therein as authors or performing artists.
3. Develop integrated policies to promote participation in cultural
life and introduce joint strategic planning across the various governmental
sectors concerned, including the ministries responsible for culture,
education, enterprise, research and digital technology, together
with those responsible for youth and equal opportunities. Involve
in the task of designing and executing these policies regional and
local authorities, according to their powers and responsibilities
in the relevant areas.
4. Stabilise the implementation of government policies in the
cultural sphere by ensuring the long-term viability of tried and
tested projects. This is so that, with the changes of political
power that are an inherent feature of any liberal democracy, each
new government does not seek to impose its stamp, periodically jeopardising
high-quality cultural projects.
5. When framing integrated policies for cultural democratisation,
take into consideration the paralysing effect of multiple sources
of discrimination (such as economic circumstances, where people
live, social status, problems arising from various disabilities,
but also the specific situation of young people) in order to identify
the types of support required so that participation in cultural
life can be tailored to these specific contexts.
6. Make the obligation to achieve results in terms of cultural
democratisation, with frequent interaction between operators, central
to the mission of every public institution that contributes to cultural
activity, education and mediation.
7. Create networks of public and private cultural operators to
enable them to share experiences and develop partnerships, whilst
pooling resources. Consider the transfrontier aspect of cultural
initiatives, with joint projects with various countries.
8. Make public funding to private cultural operators conditional
upon their contribution to cultural democratisation and to cultural
partnerships. Encourage, through fiscal measures, any forms of sponsorship that
support democratic approaches to culture and assistance in setting
up other private cultural institutions.
9. Update and significantly expand the mediation role played
by the major cultural institutions and place the following at the
heart of their programmes:
9.1 the
practice of tailoring mediation to particular target groups (the
young, the elderly, disadvantaged groups or people who stay away
from cultural resources), whilst avoiding focusing purely on one-off
activities whose sole purpose is to occasionally attract as many
people as possible to cultural places;
9.2 the development of “participatory projects” where members
of the public are invited to participate directly in the creative
process within workshops, in order to involve them personally in
artistic practice;
9.3 the use of information and communication technologies
(screens, Internet, virtual reality and augmented reality, etc.)
for multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary projects with user-friendly
environments that are likely to encourage active participation by
the public.
10. Rethink the role of the school as an institution essential
for arts education and cultural development, as a place for teaching
the skills needed to make the right to take part in cultural life
both effective and attractive, and as a place of freedom of artistic
expression and extensive contact between pupils and cultural works,
with artists, in artistic institutions or theatres and concert halls.
11. Better integrate a mandatory course on artistic and cultural
practices in national education systems. Encourage practices that
seek to foster creativity and sensitivity and that emphasise the
link between the cultural life of the region and the education system.
12. Provide induction courses in the arts for all student teachers,
thereby helping to remove the barriers between traditional teaching,
by highlighting the artistic dimension of all subjects: for example,
the various pictorial representations of relief in geography, sculptors’
mobiles as an application of the laws of physics and history of
art to accompany the teaching of historical events. Obviously, learning
to read, write and count is essential; learning to see, hear and
feel is equally essential.
13. Extend the pedagogical methods used in arts education to other
subjects by introducing interactive dialogue with pupils, and taking
care to let them speak so that they can ask questions and explain
their own individual actions as pupils.
14. Support projects that aim to establish within schools places
for artistic creation that allow contact between pupils, cultural
works and artists, and afford pupils an opportunity to learn about
free expression and artistic creation.
15. Encourage the development of amateur pursuits in extracurricular
and out-of-school settings, taking care to offer options open to
a range of choices, tailored to different groups of people.
16. Draw on local non-profit networks, with facilities for fostering
new talent with the support of skilled professionals, thereby enabling
people to discover their own previously overlooked talents. In particular,
give young people access to spaces for creative work, allowing them
every freedom to pursue their activities or develop their projects,
drawing on youth organisations, and encourage them to pool their
resources and share their creativity by forming networks with other
associations in order to devise joint projects.
17. Support, in particular financially through multi-annual objective-setting
contracts, cultural associations that provide opportunities for
local cultural mediation for young people but also for people of
every generation.
18. Encourage cultural and artistic expression which, through
a critical view on political, social, economic and cultural conditions
of today’s society, contributes to the development of critical thinking
and to reinforcing democratic citizenship. Encourage public access
to these expressions.
19. Take firmly into account the new forms of creative activity
and ways of disseminating artistic and cultural content that the
technological revolution has made possible, by abolishing geographical
and temporal boundaries, and by creating an essential space for
freedom of expression and sharing. The idea is also to encourage
the emergence of, and to adopt, new ways of consuming and creating
culture made possible by new technologies, particularly when it
comes to reaching young audiences.
20. Promote multi-disciplinary creations designed via and for
the Internet (for example Net Art) combining several modes of expression
and which use interactive digital technologies as a means of creation.
21. Ensure that there is a system in place to protect creative
endeavour, not least in order to give effect to the intellectual
property rights that are part of human rights, thus making a career
in the arts an economically viable option for young creators. The
digital revolution has brought drastic changes with positive effects
on cultural democratisation, but it has also seen the emergence
of large-scale pirating of cultural works, posing a serious threat
to future creative work. If everyone is to be able to take part
in cultural life, ways need to be found of addressing this harmful
phenomenon for the sustainability of cultural diversity.
22. For cultural development strategies to succeed in promoting
participation in cultural life and provide support for creative
endeavour, make use of the following principles of interconnection
and factors for mutual enhancement: the inter-artistic and the intercultural,
the interspatial, the inter-temporal and the inter-institutional.
II. Specific guidelines concerning the
use of the principles of interconnection
Inter-artistic and intercultural
1. Together with a thorough understanding of each artistic
discipline, develop an approach to arts education and training that
emphasises connections between the arts, not only so that everyone
can acquire a comprehensive grasp of the multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary
forms of artistic expression but also so that each discipline can
benefit from other artistic approaches.
2. Promote arts education projects which emphasise interaction
between the arts, between the arts and other fields, and between
artists and the public. For example, artistic activities that create
connections between plastic arts, music, sound and light arts and
a creative dialogue with the public through new communication technologies
in areas not dedicated to the arts (for example, industrial wastelands,
areas in social housing estates for street arts).
3. Provide more sustained ongoing political and economic support,
with multi-annual contracts setting out aims for theatres and concert
halls, exhibition centres and companies of performing and visual
artists, as these provide opportunities for contact between all
sectors of the arts and, through them, between all the cultural sectors.
They also help to bring together and actively involve a variety
of young people, amateur and professional artists.
Inter-spatial and digital arts
4. Promote creations produced with local residents (participatory
forms) and initiatives where the encounter between the arts and
people comes to life in settings capable of linking artistic, philosophical
and environmental thinking, thus giving real meaning to their citizenship:
redevelop existing covered public spaces (such as railway stations)
or open-air public spaces (such as parks) in order to turn them
into places of creative participation for local residents.
5. Encourage local cultural initiatives that seek the cultural,
historical, social and economic promotion of a given area, through
ties between creators, the public and the various professionals
involved in these initiatives.
6. Implement national programmes to digitise the cultural heritage,
one of the goals adopted by the European Commission when developing
Europeana, which provides multilingual access to the full range
of cultural heritage and contemporary cultural content.
7. Connect virtual spaces to public spaces and support ground-breaking
digital services projects with in situ facilities
(3D, augmented reality, immersive virtual reality systems, mobile
phones, podcasts, etc.) or web-based facilities that can be accessed
remotely (virtual visits, thematic routes, online services).
8. Make use of the new methods of disseminating virtual cultural
content, by transferring for example visual arts to virtual galleries
and museums where works could be displayed in online exhibitions.
9. Adopt a policy of supporting innovative cultural digital services
in order to facilitate experimentation with new uses for digital
technology and encourage new partnerships between cultural operators
and the business community and private and/or public research institutions.
Inter-temporal aspect
10. Revive traditional local skills, sources and examples
of artistic creation of former generations.
11. Work with “collective memory” artists (for instance archaeologists)
and, conversely, construct a vision of the urban environment of
the future that one wishes to pass on (prospective art).
12. Encourage initiatives that create a long-term territorial
dynamic (festivals, celebrations, theme days).
13. Promote activities related to the collective memory and also
develop along these lines the role of museum institutions, theatres
and concert halls (heritage works, artists from previous centuries
and classical theatre, for example), thereby highlighting the heritage
and enabling young people to familiarise themselves with their own
national culture and that of other countries.
Inter-institutional
14. Encourage the setting up of co-ordination bodies
to ensure that cultural policy and education policy are mutually
supportive, with permanent committees of professionals that can
be renewed at regular intervals.
15. Build closer links between schools and local and national
cultural institutions, not only in order to facilitate pupils’ access
to these institutions, but also in order to bring the skills and
experience of these institutions and their staff to arts teaching
in schools, for all pupils and from a very early age.
16. Encourage inter-institutional partnerships (between national
governmental authorities, and between national and local authorities)
and public–private partnerships, right from the strategy development
stage, for designing projects and planning, in order to ensure the
highest possible level of co-ordination and interaction.
