Introduction

Throughout modernity, institutions and cultural organisations such as museums, theatres, opera houses, theatre companies, orchestras and so on have played a crucial role in the constitutive process of civil society and of a democratic public sphere. The conceptual framing of this civil domain, from Hegel up until Habermas (1989), has focussed mainly on the national level: the ‘civil’ as the middle ground between the private individual and the political body of the nation-state. Dutch cultural policy also focuses on this level, supporting a so-called national Basic Infrastructure that provides high-quality offerings of culture, to be displayed on podia that are mainly locally supported but do comply to this national standard. The same applies to subsidised organisations and cultural projects allocated by the six national cultural funds established and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

This framing is up for discussion, for several reasons. On the one hand, the social, political and cultural issues facing civil society today go increasingly beyond the scope of the nation-state (Walzer 1995, Koopmans & Statham 2010, Fraser et al. 2014). Globalisation forces us to re-evaluate the notion of civil society, as well as civic values and virtues, and raises questions about the possibility of a transnational public sphere, which would be crucial for democratic deliberation. On the other hand, all over the globe we witness the emergence of grassroots cultural and civil organisations that do not fit the traditional profile of national institutions. These organisations lack the hierarchical order and rigid organisational structure of traditional institutions, and no longer or not primarily refer to the (national) artistic canon (Castells 2015).

In January 2017, Jet Bussemaker, Minister of Education, Culture and Science, requested a study from the Council for Culture (Raad voor Cultuur) for a new framework for cultural policy after 2021. With this request, she was responding to a long-standing wish of the cultural field and to earlier signals coming from the Council for Culture itself but also from Kunsten ’92 (the interest group for the cultural sector) and the G-9 (the nine largest municipalities) to shift the focus of cultural policy from the national to the local and regional level.