The White Paper on Cultural Decentralisation

In late March 2026, the Observatoire des politiques culturelles (the French Cultural Policies Observatory) published a White Paper compiling contributions from some forty national networks on the future of cultural decentralisation. Rather than an advocacy document, it is a collective work of reflection on what culture is within the democratic project. I propose here a reading that draws out what can help, at every point in the sector, to better dialogue with elected officials and to better work together.

Why write about it

A process like that of the White Paper rarely reaches the mainstream media. It is an object of internal work for the sector, sometimes technical, which takes time to read. Yet it seems to me that we must circulate it, because it bears witness to a rare kind of work, which is neither an advocacy claim nor the defence of a particular interest, but an effort of shared thinking among organisations that hold neither the same positions nor the same interests. That deserves to be shared.

The context is well known to everyone who works in the cultural sector. The budget cuts of 2025 weakened the entire system. The 2025 Barometer of the OPC, cited in the White Paper, indicates that 50% of responding local authorities reduced their total cultural budgets, with cuts reaching 65% for regions and 70% for departments. Under the effect of these cuts, an entire model is shaking, the one the White Paper calls “cultural decentralisation”: a system of public action founded over forty years on partnership between the State and local authorities, contractual cooperation, and cross-funding. The authors write in the OPC’s introduction:

“It is the political project of cultural decentralisation that is shaking; and with it, the cross-partisan and multi-level consensus that prevailed until now on the basis of shared values and philosophies of action, justifying support for artistic creation, the preservation of heritage, artistic and cultural education, or the aesthetic autonomy of cultural establishments.”

Faced with this situation, one can simply ask the public authorities to maintain funding and return to previous balances. One can also adopt a more demanding posture, which consists in collectively reinterrogating the meaning of public cultural action, what it should produce for democracy, and what cultural workers themselves can change. The White Paper holds both postures at once, and that is what makes it, in my view, a useful object. It documents the system, proposes institutional changes, but it also implicitly questions professional practices and postures. It is on this second, less visible side that I want to insist, because it is what makes transformations possible.

An unprecedented collective endeavour

The White Paper was coordinated by the Observatoire des politiques culturelles. It compiles contributions from four families of organisations: associations of elected officials (AMF, AMRF, FNCC, France urbaine, Intercommunalités de France, Régions de France); organisations of cultural affairs directors (FNADAC, Culture·Co); professional unions and federations (UFISC, COFAC, SYNAVI, SYNDEAC, SMA, Les Forces musicales, FNAR, Scène Ensemble); and discipline-specific federations (FAMDT, FILL, FRAAP, ACDN, ACCN, ACCR, ASN, AGCCPF, Culture EPCC, AMCSTI, CIPAC, CITI, Club 99, CNRA, France Festivals, MJC de France, Platform, Relais Culture Europe, RELIEF, ROF, Scènes d’enfance, Territoires de Cirque, TRAS, among others).

Such a convergence is unprecedented. Bringing together forty organisations whose interests can be divergent requires great patience and difficult editorial work. The synthesis in twenty points, published separately, sums up the agreements and the points of debate. More broadly, the White Paper is part of a long history of cultural decentralisation, of which the introduction recalls that it “is, on this account, regularly debated and revised. But its sustainability is today weakened by the political and budgetary context. Hence the need to take hold of it again, to give it back its meaning, and to work collectively on its future.”

What forms a consensus

The synthesis identifies thirteen subjects on which the contributions converge. This is in itself a political fact, because the diversity of contributors could have produced a more dispersed document. Here are these thirteen points, regrouped by shared concerns:

• On the architecture of responsibilities: clarify the responsibilities of each territorial layer while maintaining the principle of shared competence; sanctuarise the principle of cross-funding; restore greater fiscal power to local authorities.
• On governance and cooperation: strengthen multi-level governance and co-construction with cultural actors and their networks; develop the cross-sectoral nature of public policies; reform existing territorial consultation bodies (CTAP, CLTC, COREPS).
• On the inscription of cultural rights: give more place to cultural rights in the organisation of decentralisation.
• On procedures and funding: simplify and unify administrative procedures; generalise multi-year multi-partner objectives agreements (CPO); limit or even abolish calls for projects and consolidate operating subsidies; reform national labels for better adaptation to local issues and a rebalancing of resources; strengthen the technical and financial resources of the DRAC (Regional Cultural Affairs Directorates).
• On evaluation: revise evaluation criteria to make assessment more qualitative and shared.

Three subjects remain in debate: the attribution of specific cultural responsibilities depending on the level of authority (for example cultural territorial planning, EAC artistic and cultural education, artistic education); the designation of lead authorities to coordinate certain dimensions of cultural policies; the place and role of the State (prescriber, strategist, guarantor of territorial equity and of rights and freedoms). To these two sets, the White Paper adds an “idea box” organised in four themes (financial and fiscal innovations; territorial governance and contractualisation; territorial planning; citizen participation), in which each organisation has deposited specific proposals that the document chose not to settle.

Three orientations that I find particularly significant

Reading the document as a whole, three orientations of the consensus seem to me particularly important to carry forward and mobilise.

• The gradual exit from the logic of calls for projects, a strong and convergent demand from almost every organisation. Calls for projects turn subsidy into exhausting competition. They impose on structures an administrative cost disproportionate to the financial gain. They favour territories best equipped with engineering capacity at the expense of others. The proposed Funders’ Conference, multi-partner CPOs and the return to operating subsidies are credible exit routes.
• The inscription of cultural rights as an organising principle, which marks the move from a phase of incantation to a phase of political mobilisation. The convergence of COFAC, UFISC, Régions de France, AMRF, FAMDT and many others on this point indicates that cultural rights have moved out of a conceptual niche to become a shared reference.
• Citizen participation recognised as a structuring axis, no longer as an optional supplement. The concrete proposals reach into the very mechanics of public decision-making: opening monitoring committees of agreements to volunteers and residents (FAMDT), involving citizens in the criteria of attribution, allocation and evaluation of cultural subsidies (UFISC), adoption of the Faro Convention at the territorial level (ACCR).

The FAMDT formulates the stakes particularly clearly in its contribution:

“A new stage of cultural decentralisation cannot be a simple redistribution of competences, but must become a real redistribution of cultural power, recognising traditional music and dance, languages and popular cultures as political forces of equality, connection and territorial vitality. [...] To decentralise culture is to let culture rise from life into politics, to recognise the place of people, of volunteers, of elected officials and of technical staff as parties to one and the same contract of reciprocal commitment.”

This formulation strikes me as right, because it shifts decentralisation from a purely institutional subject to a political subject in the strong sense: who decides, who has the right to speak, who is recognised in their culture.

Restating the why of culture in the democratic project

Beyond its technical proposals, the White Paper provides the material for a new political argumentation. This is what interests me most in this publication. Too often, the cultural sector defends its budgets by invoking the importance of culture for itself, as if simply naming it were enough to justify its funding. This argument no longer works with elected officials who are looking for a political meaning to their budgetary choices, in a context where other public policies (health, social affairs, ecology) are also asserting their importance.

The AMRF, in its contribution, proposes a useful formulation:

“For rural mayors, culture is a fundamental right, a lever for social cohesion, a factor of living democracy, and a structuring tool for territorial planning. It is neither a supplement to the soul nor a peripheral policy. [...] To decentralise culture is not to move decisions further away: it is to bring them closer to where people live, while encouraging open and balanced cooperation between territories.”

This formulation joins what I have long defended. Culture funded by public money does not draw its legitimacy from its intrinsic aesthetic value; it draws it from its contribution to the republican mission, that is, to social cohesion, to the emancipation of citizens, to access to rights and to integration in the city. It is this contribution that must be named, demonstrated and evaluated, so that elected officials can in turn defend it, because this contribution joins their own mission.

To carry this argumentation, the framework of cultural rights, inscribed in French law since 2015 (NOTRe Act) and 2016 (LCAP Act), is precious. Cultural rights are not an administrative device to be inscribed in a master plan. They are an ethical requirement that translates into ways of working: respecting people’s cultural identity, their right to take part in decisions that concern them, their right to see their heritage recognised, their right to choose how they take part in cultural life. Patrice Meyer-Bisch, who led the drafting of the Fribourg Declaration in 2007, recalls in his recent text Clarifying the Cultural Meaning of Human Rights (Nectart #20, 2025) that cultural rights aim to “fight against forms of assignment and discrimination”. It is a tool for transforming practices, not a label to apply to unchanged arrangements. Seriously mobilised, it allows elected officials to understand what a cultural project actually produces for residents, and cultural workers to question their own methods.

The forgotten condition: the self-questioning of professionals

It is here, in my view, that the central stake of the White Paper lies. Asking the public authorities to simplify procedures, to safeguard cross-funding, to generalise multi-year CPOs, all of this is useful and even necessary. But none of these changes will hold over time if cultural sector professionals do not also work in parallel on their own self-questioning. Political leaders know that the sector has lost part of its legitimacy with the audiences it claims to serve, and this is what makes budget cuts possible. As long as this legitimacy has not been rebuilt, political support will remain fragile, whatever the institutional arrangements.

Several contributions of the White Paper open this path. COFAC, for instance, concludes its contribution as follows:

“COFAC calls for a new stage of cultural decentralisation founded on trust, co-construction, recognition of the autonomy of associations, lasting funding, strengthened support for volunteering, and the integration of cultural rights as a structuring principle. This refoundation is essential to ensure that culture remains a space that is shared, living, and accessible to all, and to secure the democratic vitality of the territories.”

The word “refoundation” is important. It is not only a matter of defending what exists. It is a matter of transforming methods, criteria, and postures. The UFISC’s proposals on evaluation, for example, go in this direction: “Introduce a more democratic dimension within the criteria and systems for the attribution, allocation and evaluation of subsidies, by involving in particular civil society actors and citizens.” What we evaluate, and with whom we evaluate, says what we defend. A purely quantitative evaluation, conducted among professionals without an outside gaze, ends up celebrating the institution more than it serves the democratic project.

The sincere and qualitative evaluation defended in the White Paper will not, in my view, take hold by decree. It supposes a collective work by sector professionals themselves, a work of documentation, of pooling, of inviting outside perspectives free of vested interests. It is this work that will then allow dialogue with elected officials on solid ground, because it documents what projects actually produce for people and for the democratic project.

Concrete proposals, at every point in the sector

The White Paper is a long and dense document. Rather than waiting for it to produce institutional effects by itself, I propose that everyone take hold of the material it offers, where they stand, to move the subject forward. Here are some concrete avenues, which combine the proposals of the White Paper with what I defend in my own work. They do not exhaust the subject, and they are to be completed according to each context.

If you are an elected official of a local authority:

• Read the contribution of your association of elected officials (AMF, AMRF, FNCC, Régions de France, France urbaine, Intercommunalités de France); it gives you the framework within which other elected officials at your level think about the subject.
• Ask your services and the structures you fund for a qualitative account of projects, not only figures. Which people did the project reach, how did it transform their pathways, what cooperation did it give rise to?
• Apply the question of cultural rights as a grid of evaluation: does the project respect people’s cultural identity, their right to participate, their right to be recognised in their culture?
• Convene a body of co-construction in your authority, where residents, associations, artists, technical staff and elected officials can think together about cultural policy. The “Commons Houses of Arts and Culture” proposed by FAMDT, FNAR and UFISC provide a model.
• Before cutting a budget, ask for a shared diagnosis with beneficiaries on what the cut will produce, and explore avenues for transforming projects rather than ending them.
• Move out of the logic of calls for projects, which exhausts your services and your partners. Favour multi-year agreements, which secure structures and allow long-term work.

If you are a director of a cultural structure:

• Make sincere evaluation a regular exercise of your team, not an occasional administrative obligation. Document the individual pathways of the people you accompany. Identify what did not work. Welcome the perspectives of external evaluators free of vested interests in your structure.
• Analyse your project through the lens of the 8 cultural rights of the Fribourg Declaration (identity, diversity, heritage, community, participation, education, information, cooperation). This exercise, carried out as a team, reveals blind spots.
• Open your steering and programming committees to volunteers, users, residents, in a logic of co-construction (FAMDT proposal).
• Co-construct the criteria of attribution and evaluation of subsidies with your public funders, rather than submitting to imposed indicators. The UFISC’s proposal on this point can be mobilised as is.
• Move out of the discourse on threatened freedom of creation to carry a discourse on the democratic mission of your structure. Elected officials need to understand what your project produces within their political project, and what it brings to the people to whom they are accountable.
• Regularly invite elected officials to moments that are not subsidy requests. A visit to an action, a meeting with participants, a feedback on a difficult project. These moments build a shared understanding that then becomes political support.

If you are an artist:

• Consider the encounter with residents as an artistic act in its own right, as much as creation. Territorial projects are not a compromise on artistic exigency. They are another way of working, which can be very demanding.
• When you dialogue with the elected officials of your territory, speak of your project in terms of contribution to the common good, not only in aesthetic terms. This translation is not a depoliticisation; on the contrary, it is the place where your project becomes political.
• Take part in territorial cooperative frameworks (Territorial Cultural Projects, multi-partner agreements). The White Paper defends the generalisation of the PCT (Territorial Cultural Projects) as the flagship operational tool of territorial cultural policies. To engage in them is to give concrete life to this proposal.
• In your projects, leave room for the unexpected, for proposals from participants, for fertile drift. The creation that authorises people to exist culturally, while not renouncing its own exigency, is today the most politically useful.

If you are technical staff in the cultural, social or educational sector:

• Work across silos with your colleagues in social work, youth, education, territorial planning. The White Paper makes this a point of consensus. At your level, organise inter-sectoral dialogue moments, even brief ones, around concrete projects.
• Document processes, not only results. An eight-page note recounting what happened in a project, what worked, what got stuck, what was surprising, is often worth more than a quantitative dashboard.
• Take an active part in territorial consultation bodies (CTAP, CLTC, COREPS, funders’ conferences), to make them live. The White Paper notes their current weakness. This weakness is due in part to the limited mobilisation of technical staff, who often see them as formalities. Turning them into real working spaces requires personal investment.
• Bring back to your elected officials the existing practices of qualitative evaluation, equipping them to understand what these practices bring. The White Paper makes shared qualitative evaluation a consensus, but the concrete translation is still missing. You are in a position to provide this translation.

If you are engaged in associative or civic life in a territory:

• Ask your local authority what its cultural strategy is, how it is built, who takes part in it. The White Paper defends the obligation for intermunicipal authorities to adopt a cultural strategy (FNADAC, Intercommunalités de France). This demand can be carried locally.
• Ask for the opening of the monitoring committees of cultural agreements to volunteers and residents, as proposed by the FAMDT. You have something to bring to the system: a knowledge of real needs that professionals do not always have.
• If the 2005 Faro Convention is mentioned in your local authority (ACCR proposal in the White Paper), seize it: it recognises the right of every person to contribute to the definition of heritage. It is a useful legal and political tool.

Let it circulate

The full White Paper and its twenty-point synthesis are available on the website of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles. I invite you to read them, to circulate them in your networks, to submit them to the elected officials of your territory. By its mere existence, this document bears witness to the sector’s capacity to work together in a difficult period. It offers material that everyone can take hold of, where they stand, to advance the place of culture in the democratic project.

Culture funded by public money no longer defends itself today by what it is. It defends itself by what it does for democracy and for the bonds it weaves between people, in the recognition of each person’s cultural dignity. It is this argumentation that must be built together, with elected officials as partners in the same mission. The White Paper, seriously mobilised, can serve this purpose.

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The full White Paper and the twenty-point synthesis are available on the website of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles: www.observatoire-culture.net