According to the Law on Local Self-Government[1], the head of the community implements the following functions in the field of education, culture and youth work.
organizes and manages the activities of schools, kindergartens, clubs, culture houses, libraries, other educational and cultural institutions and organizations, their operation and repair works.
The head of the community has the following functions:
- organizes events related to the holidays and memorial days of the Republic of Armenia.
- supports the development of crafts, folk creativity and artistic self-activity;
- supports the preservation of historical and cultural monuments in the territory of the community;
- records, classifies and distributes the information about the historical-cultural, natural and tourist-recreational resources located in the territory of the community;
- supports increasing the role of youth;
- supports the activities of public schools. The Law on Local Government, adopted in 1996 and amended in 2012 and 2016, was the first attempt to decentralize cultural policy, to dismantle of the highly centralized and paternalistic Soviet model of cultural policy and to create a decentralized model of cultural policy on a liberal basis.
If the Soviet model assumed the adoption and implementation of decisions only from the “centre” /Ministry of Culture/, then in the years of independence, especially in the first decade, the culture management system was decentralized, which became the basis for the disintegration of a number of cultural structures, for example, community libraries, culture houses, art schools. Being cut off from the direct funding and patronage of the Ministry of Culture and passing under the authority of the municipal governments without receiving the appropriate financial and technical support, most community cultural institutions have been disintegrated, disappeared or survived just formally[2].
[1] See https://www.arlis.am/documentview.aspx?docID=73271
[2] See: Muradyan H., Houses of Culture in Soviet and post-Soviet times: Semantic and Functional Transformations and Heredity, Proceedings of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, HAIA-3, Yerevan, 2019, 194-203.
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