By Gonzalo Casals, Culture & Arts Policy Institute
Abstract
In the United States, cultural policy is often fragmented, shaped not only by government but by philanthropy, civil society, and market institutions. This essay argues that the absence of coordinated cultural governance limits culture’s civic, social, and economic potential. It calls for a new approach that aligns actors across the ecosystem—connecting donors, organizations, and government officials—to strengthen democratic life and ensure culture serves as both infrastructure and an instrument of societal well-being. This essay is intended for civil servants, cultural leaders, philanthropic funders, community organizations, and civic institutions seeking to better understand the structural forces shaping cultural life in the United States and to explore strategies for establishing effective cultural governance.
Introduction
When striking writers shut down television productions, when books vanish from school shelves, and when protestors topple statues in public squares, few frame these acts as policy. But each reshapes the terms of civic life.
Such moments are often framed as “culture wars,” but they reflect deeper battles over power, recognition, and belonging. Culture sits at the center of today’s most visible political conflicts, not just in controversies over representation, but in broader debates about values, rights, and civic life. It is not only a site of struggle but also a tool. Across U.S. history, movements for civil rights, labor protections, gender equity, and immigrant inclusion have used cultural expression to shape public imagination, build solidarity, and assert presence in civic life. Culture defines who is seen, whose experiences are validated, and how collective identity is constructed.
Understanding these dynamics is critical for anyone influencing public resources, institutional agendas, or cultural programming. Whether in government, philanthropy, education, media, or community initiatives, these decisions shape cultural access and the democratic character of civic life. These overlapping, decentralized decisions illustrate why coordinated cultural governance is essential.
Yet despite its profound influence, cultural policy remains largely invisible. Large foundations may fund overlapping initiatives, such as arts education and digital storytelling, without coordination, leading to redundancy or conflicting goals. When funding priorities shift in isolation, they can destabilize parts of the ecosystem that depend on continuity, affecting artists, educators, and cultural institutions alike.
Different actors also operate with divergent incentives: governments may prioritize access, philanthropies may focus on innovation or equity, and commercial platforms often pursue scale and engagement. These competing logics make long-term alignment difficult.
Meanwhile, zoning and real estate decisions often displace cultural communities. Neighborhoods known for immigrant-owned venues or historically Black arts districts may be rezoned for commercial development, severing links between culture, place, and identity, all without cultural governance ever entering the discussion. As a result, choices that shape public memory and access to cultural life are made every day, often without being recognized as policy at all.
To fully grasp how culture structures collective life and how decisions about it are made, we must expand our definition of policy, rethink who holds power to shape it, and recognize the need for cultural governance to coordinate responsibility across the ecosystem.
What Policy Is, and What Makes It Work
Public policy is the way a society decides who gets what and why. It’s how power, resources, and meaning are distributed across people, communities, and institutions. Often, these choices appear in familiar forms: when a city allocates funding across housing, transportation, policing, and culture, it signals whose needs carry political weight.
When a state decides what goes into school curricula, or whose histories appear in textbooks, it is shaping how identity is taught. When federal agencies define who qualifies for public benefits or which workers deserve protections, they are deciding whose claims on the state are legitimate. Even zoning laws, what can be built where, and who gets to object, quietly shape opportunity, risk, and belonging.
These are not just bureaucratic decisions. They are acts of value-setting. Public policy is not only about big legislation or landmark reforms. It is the daily accumulation of choices, vast and small, that structure how people live, and what a society believes it owes to whom.
These cumulative decisions make up the real substance of public policy. But recognizing policy is only the first step. To understand what makes it effective, what allows policy to hold, endure, and shape daily life, we need to look at how it functions in practice.
For policy to work, three forces must align: material capacity, symbolic power, and evidentiary grounding. When these forces come together—capacity enabling action, symbolism building support, and evidence sustaining impact—policy moves from good intention to lasting effect.
Culture as Policy, and as Policymaker
Culture is everywhere in civic life, and because of that, it functions in two ways at once. It is an object of policy: what governments and institutions fund, regulate, preserve, or promote. And it is an instrument of policy: a means through which other goals, social, civic, or economic, are advanced. This dual role helps explain why culture is so influential and why it is so difficult to govern coherently.
Culture influences collective life through multiple channels. It shapes public imagination: the stories and symbols that define what is possible. For example, media and literature often set societal expectations and inspire collective aspirations. It builds social infrastructure by fostering trust, belonging, and cooperation; community art projects, festivals, and cultural events strengthen social bonds and networks. It serves as institutional infrastructure when museums, theaters, and libraries deliver education, care, or civic engagement. These institutions act as platforms for learning, dialogue, and participation. Finally, culture sets norms and habits through repeated participation, often more durably than law, shaping values, behaviors, and social expectations.
Significantly, these dynamics are shaped not only by formal institutions but also by communities themselves: neighborhood groups, grassroots organizations, and local cultural networks actively determine which traditions are preserved, which narratives are amplified, and how participation unfolds.
This dynamic has played out across U.S. history. During the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project did more than employ artists; it helped define national identity at a time of crisis. Sesame Street, backed by federal investment, reshaped educational media while promoting inclusion and empathy. More recently, the COVID-19 memorial at Green-Wood Cemetery became a site for public mourning and civic repair, without a single piece of legislation behind it. In all these cases, culture did not merely reflect society. It structured it, operating not as commentary, but as connective infrastructure that helped advance policy by shaping how people think, relate, and act together.
Systems of Cultural Support: Centralized and Decentralized
Cultural systems don’t arise by accident; they reflect how nations organize power, responsibility, and care. In centralized models, as seen in many European countries, the state plays a dominant role in shaping cultural life, funding major institutions, setting national priorities, and sustaining infrastructure that makes cultural access broadly available. In these contexts, cultural policy often operates like an extension of the welfare state: stable, bureaucratic, and public.
This model brings clear advantages: recurring public funding protects institutions from market volatility, bureaucratic systems ensure consistency, and public responsibility affirms that culture is a shared good rather than a private luxury.
In highly decentralized systems, such as that of the United States, cultural policy operates across both public and private spheres. Authority is distributed among government, private philanthropy, civil society, and commercial creative industries. Within this ecosystem, local communities, neighborhood organizations, and grassroots cultural networks play a vital role in sustaining cultural life, generating participation, and ensuring that diverse voices are represented, often outside formal funding structures. Federal cultural agencies remain small, local support is uneven, and non-state actors wield significant influence over cultural access and value.
The Tradeoffs of Decentralization
Centralization brings stability, decentralization brings diversity, and each offers tradeoffs. In centralized systems, cultural policy is consistent and widely accessible but can become rigid, slow to adapt, or concentrated in the hands of a few. Local practices may be overlooked. Alternative voices may struggle to gain support.
Decentralized systems, like those in the U.S., allow experimentation, local autonomy, and a plurality of cultural expressions, but they also make coordination more difficult. Authority becomes diffuse, accountability uneven, and the cultural ecosystem vulnerable to fragmentation. More actors can shape outcomes, but aligning them around a shared purpose becomes more difficult.
Neither model is inherently superior. Each creates different possibilities and different challenges for how culture is supported, shared, and sustained.
Everyone Is a Policymaker
In a decentralized system like that of the United States, no single entity directs or coordinates cultural policy. Authority is dispersed, often operating without shared frameworks or accountability.
Cultural policy isn’t just made in legislatures or government offices. It is shaped every day by artists, administrators, educators, curators, donors, and advocates, as well as by local communities, grassroots organizations, and collective cultural practices. Through their decisions about what is preserved, who is served, what is funded, and how culture lives in civic life, these actors influence accessibility, visibility, and meaning.
Power is often exercised implicitly: grant guidelines, curatorial decisions, and platform algorithms influence whose narratives are circulated. Real estate and zoning choices can displace or anchor cultural communities. Meanwhile, community-led initiatives, neighborhood projects, and grassroots cultural events actively shape participation, inclusion, and the local cultural environment.
These actors rarely think of themselves as policymakers, but their decisions influence access, visibility, labor conditions, and meaning at scale. Cultural policy is always being made, even when no one calls it that.
From Fragmentation to Cultural Governance
If cultural policy is produced through dispersed decisions, the central challenge is not its absence, but its lack of alignment. In decentralized systems, fragmentation is not a glitch. It is the baseline condition, a natural outcome of uncoordinated authority.
For policy to hold, three forces must align: material capacity, symbolic legitimacy, and evidentiary grounding. But no single actor can supply all three. These forces emerge through coordination across the ecosystem. When governments, funders, institutions, and communities act in isolation, alignment falters: programs stall, institutions lose direction, and workers carry disproportionate risk. Conversely, when communities actively organize, share knowledge, and coordinate with other sectors, they can mitigate fragmentation, sustain local cultural ecosystems, and strengthen the system’s overall resilience.
This erosion doesn’t stem from any single failure. It accumulates across sectors—public budgets contract. Philanthropic strategies shift. Nonprofits chase survival. Markets respond to short-term opportunities. Each decision may be rational in isolation, but collectively, they wear down the system’s ability to deliver on its civic, economic, and democratic potential.
Cultural governance responds not by consolidating power, but by coordinating responsibility. It is not the end goal. It is the means through which culture’s full societal benefit can be realized. By making implicit policy visible and aligning incentives across actors, governance helps restore coherence to a system built on interdependence.
A Civic Obligation
Meeting this challenge requires a fully resourced cultural governance structure, one capable of convening institutions, aligning fragmented agendas, and surfacing the implicit decisions that shape civic life. Such a structure wouldn’t replace existing agencies or institutions. It would connect them. In New York City, this could take the form of a coordinating body that brings together representatives from government, philanthropy, cultural institutions, and communities. Community representatives, local organizations, and grassroots networks would be integral participants, ensuring local knowledge and priorities shape collective decision-making. Their role wouldn’t be to dictate content, but to identify shared priorities, improve data transparency, align funding strategies, and support infrastructure for long-term planning.
Regional or sector-specific nodes could help ensure responsiveness to local contexts and diverse cultural practices. The goal is not centralized control, but distributed coordination, with shared frameworks, reciprocal accountability, and sustained investment.
Culture is not a byproduct of policy. It is one of its most powerful instruments, shaping how people see themselves, their communities, and their shared future. Taking responsibility for that influence, openly, deliberately, and collectively, is not just a governance challenge. It is a civic obligation.
Coordination, in this sense, is not about control. It is about mutual responsibility. It is how we create the conditions for culture to serve the full scope of its societal benefit: fostering economic vitality, supporting social well-being, and sustaining democratic life.