European inventory of
societal values of culture

Access to culture - Policy Analysis

Access to culture (2013). Policy Analysis: Final Report.

Access to culture has become a major topic on the cultural policy agenda of Europe as well as on other levels of government. The European Civil Society Platform on “Access to Culture”, implemented through the European Agenda for Culture’s structured dialogue process has developed policy guidelines with a range of recommendations to the European Commission, the EU member states and other levels of government. They range from “understanding the needs of all publics”, to “raising awareness of the legal frameworks on access to culture”. The guidelines stress that there is a specific gap between normative discourses stressing the need to provide access to culture for all and the social reality.

This project aims at interrogating the gap between social reality and political normativity in the area of access to culture and develop a set of recommendations to the European Union, aiming to improve European thinking on this issue and to interlink national discourse and the European dimension. Feasibility of recommendations will be given by the compliance of re-evaluated indicators on Access to Culture applicable all across the EUROSTAT countries showing the achievements of policy initiatives in each setting.