Compared to the situation in many other European countries, public sector funding is unusually dominant in funding arts and heritage in the Nordic countries, especially in Sweden. During the post-war decades, commercially produced culture was considered low quality by official cultural policy, and private donations were considered to threaten the independence of arts and culture. Since the 1990s, donations on sponsoring have been increasingly viewed as a complement to public financial support of cultural institutions. Expectations that sponsoring would become an important source of funding have proved wrong so far, and the issue has, in view of the marginality of current sponsoring, begun to cool down politically. Official cultural statistics does not calculate the size of voluntary contributions either in the form of voluntary work or in the form of donations. Since donations to cultural purposes are not tax deductible, and no statistics are collected, only very limited data exist on the size of donations.
In 2013, the Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis collected information on both crowd funding and sponsorship as sources of funding for public cultural institutions. According to the agency, such private funding of culture may still be limited in Sweden but they also observed changes in the structure of the arts and culture sector suggesting that these sources of revenue may continue to grow in importance, for example there is an increasingly strong donation culture in Swedish society; an increasing concern in the wider image of business companies; and an increasing interest in corporate social responsibility. When it comes to crowd funding, increasing willingness to donate money is again an important factor, as is the increasing use of the Internet, and connectedness in Internet-based networks. At the same time, the Agency for Cultural Analysis warned that private funding of culture in Sweden is likely to remain low for the foreseeable future, and that all artistic and cultural endeavours do not have the same chances to attract private funding. Both corporate sponsorship and crowd funding requires networks and contacts. Furthermore, such funding for projects in many cases requires that basic funding is available. There is also a risk that private funding may contribute to public funding, concentrating on those who have the resources to obtain private funding as well (Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis 2013.
While these risks of resource concentration undoubtedly exist, it should also be noted that the Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis focused on cultural institutions, i.e. on organizations already obtaining public funding. The extent to which sponsorship and donations are common on the local level in smaller towns and communities remains largely unknown, but this is likely an important source of income for minor cultural endeavours. It also appears that in terms of cultural funding from private foundations and in terms of the mobilisation of voluntary work in various cultural associations, civil society support of culture appears to be far more important than business.
Comments are closed.