Scaffolding agency in cultural policy: a capabilities framework for evaluating cultural interventions

Abstract The role of culture in promoting social and behavioral change has gained increasing attention in cultural policy, yet mechanisms of intervention, which we situate on a spectrum ranging from nudges to cultural interventions, remain insufficiently conceptualized. This lack of clarity obscures how different interventions relate to one another and complicates their evaluation, contributing to the well-known limitations of “toolkit” approaches. This paper develops a unifying framework that understands interventions as ways of scaffolding agency across multiple dimensions. Drawing on the capabilities approach, philosophy, and situated cognition, we argue that nudges and cultural interventions are best conceived as points on a spectrum defined by the degree of agency they afford. This perspective provides principled criteria for both intervention design and impact assessment, offering an alternative to reductive evaluation models while accommodating the complexity of cultural engagement.