The most significant trends in cultural policy in the 21st century have been the result of increasing regionalisation, globalisation, and digitalisation; in particular, the increased movements of people, cultural goods, and cultural influences across national borders have been significant influences on developments in arts and culture, as well as increasingly in cultural policy. The main cultural policy responses to these changes can be summed up as a new perspective on Sweden as a multicultural society, a more positive perspective on the cultural and creative industries, and new efforts to transfer policy-making powers from the national to the regional level.
The notion of Sweden as a multicultural society, and the implications of this, has increasingly been the subject of political debate in the last several years. So far, cultural policy remains relatively stable, but there are indications that the consensus that once characterised Swedish cultural policy is beginning to give way to increased politicisation. One reason for this is the emergence of the nationalist Sweden Democrats as a major political party, and now a close ally of the governing coalition. Many researchers also see a more general tendency towards an increased polarisation of the political climate of Sweden. Increasing polarisation and politicisation of cultural policy can be noticed, for example, in recent debates on threats against artists and other professionals in the culture sector, political activism in libraries, politicisation of museums, free entry at national museums, and politicisation of the influence of grant-giving bodies on artists and artistic projects (Harding 2022, Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis 2021).
Since October 2022, Sweden is governed by a centre-right coalition government with the support of the Sweden Democrats. While the published agreement between the coalition parties and the Sweden Democrats only mentions a few aspects of cultural policy, these include the establishment of a Swedish culture canon, as well as the appointment of government commissions for reevaluating the government support model for popular adult education (folkbildning) and public service media. The importance of the arm’s-length principle in cultural policy is explicitly stated in the agreement, but without giving a clear definition. Most of these issues have now been addressed by the government, and neither popular adult education nor public service broadcasting has been reorganised, although funding for popular adult education has been reduced.
Partially because of increasing debate, the Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis was tasked by the government in 2019 to review the effects of political control on artistic freedom. In 2021, they delivered their report from this project, identifying four main threats to artistic freedom and recommending that the government should increase its efforts to counteract these:
- Hatred, threats, campaigns, and harassment of artists, motivated by hostility against cultural expressions and/or the artists themselves.
- Government restrictions of artistic freedom in the implementation of cultural policies.
- Excessively detailed policies and policy objectives forcing arts and culture funded by government bodies to adapt to policy agendas.
- Excessively strict financial frameworks circumventing the freedom of artists and cultural creators, and undermining free and inclusive cultural life, in practice restricting the opportunity to express oneself artistically to only a few (Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis 2021).
There is good reason to think that this assessment is still valid.
The government report presented in September 2023 proposing changes in the relationship between the national, regional, and local levels of government could be seen as a step towards further increasing regional autonomy in cultural policy, while at the same time increasing the protection of artistic freedom in government-funded arts and culture on the regional and local level. A law on collaboration between the state, region, and municipality in the cultural field is suggested to simplify the processes within the model and guarantee artistic freedom in the regional and municipal activities funded through the model. The existing regional culture plans should be replaced with plans focusing on the state-funded parts of regional cultural policy. The Swedish Arts Council should be given full authority to represent the state in this area, and new artistic and cultural areas should be possible to include in the plans (SOU 2023:58). So far, these proposed reforms have not been enacted, and the Cultural Cooperation Model may remain unchanged.
Another major issue in Swedish cultural policy in the last few years has been the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. As elsewhere in Europe, government recommendations and restrictions against public events have had serious consequences for the cultural sector of the economy. By July 2021, revenue in artistic activities had decreased by 18.6 per cent, according to preliminary statistics from the Arts Grants Committee. Cultural activities have yet to recover fully from this downturn (for a discussion of the consequences of the pandemic on the arts and culture sector in the Nordic countries, see Kulturanalys Norden 2023). During the pandemic, the internet has played a larger role than ever in people’s cultural habits, from listening to music to ordering books and watching theatre performances. Many cultural institutions have increased their efforts to make their work electronically available. The long-term consequences of the pandemic remain difficult to predict, but they will continue to affect the culture sector, as well as society as a whole, for the foreseeable future. In 2021, financial measures amounting to SEK 3,916 million in the years 2022–2024, and 760 million a year after 2024 to “restart” the culture sector were proposed in a government report, in addition to the support programs already initiated by the government. (SOU 2021:77). Not all this funding has materialised in national budgets (prop. 2023/2024:1). Introduced as a crisis budget, the national budget for 2024 included several cuts in public spending on arts and culture, the largest of which concerned support for popular adult education (Sw. folkbildning) (see also 6.4 and 7.2).
Digitalisation has been a feature of the cultural sector in Sweden, much as in other nations, at least since the 1990s. Digitalisation of archives, libraries, and museum collections is an ongoing work (see 2.4), as is the engagement of cultural institutions and agencies with social media, and through these with the public. This work is now very much part of everyday life in the Swedish cultural sector. In the last few years, another layer is added to digitalisation in the form of emerging technologies and applications in artificial intelligence (A.I.), and particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs), and related image-generating programs. These developments now challenge an unknown number of jobs in arts and culture, as well as the copyrights of work used to train A.I. While these threats have been frequently discussed, it currently appears that the initiative in regulating these technologies primarily lies with the E.U., potentially influencing and strengthening the role of the E.U. in cultural policy in the long term, at least if we assume that this area is going to become increasingly central to cultural work in Europe. On the national level, the government displays a generally positive attitude to A.I. in cultural policy, promoting the use of A.I. to a higher degree in government-financed arts and culture, in cultural institutions, and in the government agencies themselves.
Another recent development in Swedish cultural policy is that discussions concerned with it have increasingly focused on its relation to national security and defence preparedness. The 2023 government report on civil defence and general preparedness stated that “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing protracted war have put the spotlight on the importance of culture for a country at war” (Ds. 2023:34, p. 77), emphasizing not only the importance of protecting heritage in wartime, or its importance to national identity, and thus to morale and motivation, but also the role of arts and culture for maintaining a sense of normalcy, a functioning public life, providing entertainment, but also valuable methods for processing the traumatic realities of war. This report has later been followed by a government bill (prop. 2024/25:34), and a report on protecting the autonomy of arts and culture in wartime (McWilliams et al 2026). Additionally, a new council has been created for exchanging ideas and experiences regarding the protection of cultural heritage in wartime. This council includes representatives of the National Heritage Board, the National Archive, the National Library, the Agency for Civil Defence, the National Property Board, the County Administrative Boards, the national museums, and the Church of Sweden.
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