How to set in motion an approach open to cultural rights, that is to say, to put more democracy in the projects and the relationship with the public? A good way to start is to analyze your project according to the 8 cultural rights proposed by the “Fribourg Declaration” (2007). This is just the beginning.
The « cultural rights », to which several articles of law in France refer, are in themselves a concept that has multiple definitions, with no consensus or official text that would define it in a fixed way. The “Fribourg Declaration” is not a ratified legislative text, it is a proposal for the formalization of cultural rights, which is considered the most accomplished. It is extremely useful in political terms, because even if it is not in itself a legislative text, its proposals are all based on legal texts that can be mobilized at the legal level.
We can therefore use the Fribourg Declaration to analyze its project, using the 8 “cultural rights” it identifies. This is an exercise that can be done in teams. We ask ourselves the question “how does my project take into account these 8 cultural rights”, and we share and discuss the answers:
- The right to choose and respect one’s cultural identity.
- The right to know and respect one’s own culture, as well as other cultures.
- The right to have access to cultural heritages.
- The right to refer, or not, to one or more cultural communities.
- The right to participate in cultural life.
- The right to educate and train in the respect of cultural identities.
- The right to participate in an adequate information (to be informed and to inform).
- The right to participate in the development of cultural cooperation.
Link to the complete Freiburg declaration.
These questions, if we take the time to approach them through real personal work and collective exchanges, raise issues that are often very profound. They are really operative to perceive one’s project in a completely different way, with a view to democracy. The Paideia action-research approach accompanies these questions over a period of a year and a half for those who commit themselves to it, by transmitting a method to make it live on the ground, with successive and collective evaluations.
8 starting points for a very demanding approach
These 8 cultural rights really allow us to dig deep into the why of projects, their raison d’être in the light of the democratic system that allows them to be funded. This seems to me an excellent starting point. But it’s only a start, because the key, after that, is the question of how:
- How do we get human beings to implement, in movement rather, the answers found to these questions?
- How can we accompany, without hypocrisy, the profound changes in modes of organization, governance, hierarchy, professional and personal practices, which necessarily result from a sincere opening to cultural rights?
- How can people and institutions, whether public or private, integrate the destabilization (deep questioning of established practices, need for new practices, especially digital) that a cultural rights approach represents?
- To summarize it very quickly: how to accept to lose power, how to accept to be changed?
- What management methods should be used, and how can we support this type of change in a sustainable way, especially among multiple partners, which will affect the heart of projects, professions, social relations, institutional structures, and personal postures?
- How can we avoid, with the best intentions in the world, perverting the initial democratic objectives without even realizing it?
- How to keep an open and evolving framework?
This first analysis with the help of the Fribourg Declaration can therefore constitute an excellent starting point. But the implementation of cultural rights is another matter, which must be nourished by other, very destabilizing, approaches that require a long and demanding personal, collective and institutional, in short political, path. It is necessary to take the measure of it.
