This month, Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, reports on a new paper which asserts that culture should be seen as part of essential infrastructure, rather than discretionary, and makes the case for culture as a collective public good, making links to CLA’s own Arts Education Capabilities Framework.
Calafati, L., Gilmore, A., O’Connor, J., & Williams, K (2026) Culture as Foundational. The Foundational Economy Collective (https://foundationaleconomy.com)
“Culture as Foundational” argues that culture should be understood as an essential infrastructure, like water or healthcare, rather than a discretionary luxury. The working paper addresses the profound crisis facing cultural provision in the mid-2020s and makes the case for culture as a collective good requiring public funding.
The authors distinguish between culture as a whole way of life and culture as specific practices of art making, performance, literature and music. Their focus is on this second definition: the spaces where communities create shared meaning through cultural expression. They argue that culture is foundational because it provides essential capabilities for democratic citizenship. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s work, they identify three roles for culture: helping develop human creativity and shared values, enabling us to make collective judgements about what we value, and contributing to broader social and economic outcomes.
The problem is, the authors say, that contemporary cultural policy has become dominated by the third role alone. Culture is increasingly reduced to its economic value through creative industries discourse, justified through market failure arguments and elaborate metrics. Cultural activities are treated as private consumer goods rather than essential elements of social life that cannot be reduced to commodities or cost-benefit analysis.
The authors focus is on cultural infrastructure. This encompasses buildings, facilities, spaces, funding frameworks, networks and digital platforms that enable cultural production and consumption. The authors trace how post-1945 British cultural provision developed through bodies like the Arts Council, initially generously funded from government revenue surpluses. The explosion of popular culture from the 1960s created new demands, leading eventually to creative city agendas in the 1990s. Today, this ecosystem is collapsing under three pressures. First, platform capitalism has created monopolies controlling digital cultural spaces. Companies like Netflix, Google and Meta are reshaping both cultural production and consumption while fragmenting shared meaning-making. Second, government at all levels has become unable to pay for culture. Between 2010 and 2023, English local authority spending on cultural services was halved in real terms. Third, these pressures mean cultural professionals are losing autonomy, small independent cultural businesses are struggling with rising costs, and cultural practitioners cannot make sustainable livings.
Finding solutions is difficult within existing political constraints. At national level, the authors identify formidable challenges: the intractability of platform monopolies protected by American power and a political class fixated on reducing public spending rather than reforming taxation. Substantive change requires broad social movements capable of challenging current priorities, though culture faces particular difficulties in generating such movements.
More hopefully, the paper identifies opportunities at local level where the consequences of ecosystem failure are concrete and place-based identities provide anchors for action. Rather than demanding universal rights, the authors advocate reversing deterioration in specific conditions: promoting accessible cultural infrastructure for participation, supporting independent cultural production through income support and affordable workspace, and protecting spaces of cultural consumption from property developers. Success depends on building alliances with organisations like housing associations and health trusts, identifying issues that connect culture to broader community concerns, and accessing funding from health and economic development budgets where culture’s connections to wellbeing are increasingly recognised.
The paper concludes by arguing that culture is not peripheral but central to addressing our current democratic crisis, creating spaces where shared experiences emerge rather than remaining buried, fragmented and isolated.
Relevance for Arts Educators and Organisations
The report does not address Arts education as an integral part of cultural infrastructure. However, it does provide a way of talking about culture’s value beyond economic impact statistics. The approach taken in the paper is congruent with the CLA work on capabilities and provides a wider context. Two points are worth noting:
- The distinction between culture’s three roles provides language for resisting pressure to justify everything through instrumental outcomes, and to acknowledge broader benefits – capabilities. Cultural education is important for enabling democratic participation without abandoning evidence of social impacts.
- Understanding cultural infrastructure as distinct from but connected to wider ecosystems shows why Arts educators and Arts organisations have a key role in schools and communities and why their long-term sustainability is crucial.
The report’s most challenging message is that meaningful change requires social movements capable of shifting government priorities, not just better advocacy within existing frameworks. This raises difficult questions about whether survival depends on fundamental political transformation, and what roles cultural workers can play in catalysing such change whilst meeting immediate needs and keeping organisations viable.
For Arts educators, the paper also raises the question of how to ensure that education is seen as an integral part of cultural infrastructure.
