Infrastructuring cultural policy: the case of Creative Europe’s “Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities”

Cultural networks play an important role in cultural governance: facilitating cooperation between local and EU policy actors and shaping policymaking processes. The network-led, Creative Europe-financed project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities (CCSC; 2018–2021) experimented with policy co-creation between civic, cultural, and administrative stakeholders, addressing a variously discussed gap between these actors. Asking whether the concerns of cultural actors gain traction in EU-level policymaking, I use discourse analysis of CCSC publications to identify differences in projects stakeholders’ problem representations. Underlining the importance of policy co-creation projects as discursive arenas and spaces of encounter, the cultural actors’ local perspective problematises responsibility and participation of citizens as contextual and ultimately structural questions. The essential work of local cultural actors in networks is not addressed, and networks themselves recede in CCSC discussions. The paper suggests that future EU cultural policy should more explicitly recognise and support the infrastructural labour that enables soft governance.