The most significant trends in cultural policy in the 21st century have been the results of increasing regionalisation, globalisation, and digitalization; 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 characterized Swedish cultural policy is beginning to give way to increased politicization. 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 polarization of the political climate of Sweden. Increasing polarization and politicization 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, politicization of museums, free entry at national museums, and politicization 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, including in the national budget for 2024.
Partially as a result 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, 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).
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 state, region, and municipality in the cultural field is suggested, to simplify the processes within the model, and guaranteeing 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).
Another major issue in Swedish cultural policy in the last few of 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 from artistic activities had decreased by 18.6 percent, 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 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 it is clear that 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 programmes already initiated by the government. (SOU 2021:77). Not all of this funding has materialized 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).
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