Norwegian cultural policy has been very stable over the last 20-30 years despite changing governments. Generally, there has been few debates and few major changes in the cultural budget. The latest white paper on culture draw a special attention to cultural expressions and freedom of speech. This is emphasised in the introduction:
Art and culture are expressions that build society, and cultural policy must be based on freedom of speech and tolerance. The cultural sector and civil society are prerequisites for an educated and enlightened public, and thus an investment in democracy.
Compared to the last white paper on cultural policy (2003), where the main goals were public access to culture of high-quality art and culture the recent white paper describes a more fundamental task for the culture sector, namely to safeguard democracy. This change has also a juridical backdrop. In 2004, the paragraph on press freedom in the Norwegian constitution was changed from “There should be freedom of press” into “There should be freedom of expression”. The paragraph was further expanded with the governmental responsibility of providing the fundament for an “open and informed public discourse”. The paragraph underlined the government’s responsibility to ensure a framework for production and distribution of expressions.
Regionalisation of culture has also been a topic within the last years. A regional reform has decreased the numbers of municipalities from 428 to 356 and the number of regions from 19 to 11. One aim of the reform was to transfer state responsibility down to regional and local governments, also within the culture sector. This led to several debates. Currently (2022) few changes in responsibility have been made.
Since 2000, there has been a major establishment of new infrastructure for culture, both in Oslo and elsewhere in the country. In several cities, large cultural centres, and concert hall (kulturhus) has been built. Within the last two years, the new National Museum (of art) and the Much Museum moved into monumental new buildings in Oslo.
A rather small change that has caused huge changes in the culture budget is a funding change for Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) where license payment has been exchanged with tax payment. The change has not caused much public debate and the budget of NRK has not change considerable. However, expenses for NRK are now visible in the state budget for media.
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