The concept is not new. The relationship between culture and citizenship can be traced back to the French Revolution, when the royal collections were made public and the very first public museum was created. As an academic idea, cultural citizenship emerged in the 1990s within debates on belonging, recognition and minority cultural rights, and has since been productive across disciplines and geographies. Yet, as Gigante notes, the mechanisms through which cultural citizenship can actually be enacted in museums remain largely unexplored, and the term is often disconnected from its theoretical lineages. Her definition is deliberately political: post-national forms of political belonging and agency over one’s spatial-cultural context through situated and collective cultural practices, meaning the power to challenge borders and norms and co-create our surroundings by coming together through culture and the arts.

Policy discourse has featured the phrase since the early 2000s, but often in a diluted form. In the European context, cultural citizenship appeared as one of four dimensions of citizenship in the Council of Europe’s report on Education for Democratic Citizenship, where it was identified with a set of competencies such as cultural awareness, knowledge of heritage and history, and literacy skills that would enable citizens to engage in a democratic society. Northern European countries such as the Netherlands operationalised the concept to navigate the complexities of postmigrant societies, where defining citizenship through culture becomes a terrain of negotiation. These experiments reveal a central tension: cultural citizenship carries normative connotations when mapped onto legal membership in a nation-state, defining what makes a good cultural citizen, but it can also signify the emancipatory power of culture to redesign the politics of belonging.

Recent European cultural policy signals a shift toward the more emancipatory reading, a process partly expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic, which foregrounded the role of local communities in the cultural sector. The 2020 Rome Charter identifies five cultural capabilities for equitable cultural citizenship, from the opportunity to explore cultural roots to the ability to share cultures and protect common cultural resources. The Porto Santo Charter, adopted under the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the EU, places cultural citizenship within the endeavour to build a pluralistic society where cultural institutions foster cultural democracy through their processes and public offer. In the European Commission’s Culture and Democracy: The Evidence report, cultural citizenship is defined as contributing to the right of citizens to shape their society and to influence the creation and interpretation of meaning in that society. Beyond Europe, a more politicised use appears in Australia, where the term supports cultural diversity and values the forms of cultural capital that community members acquire through cultural production.

Despite these efforts, Gigante argues, policy documents often dim the concept’s radical potential by reducing it to a set of competencies, framing it as something to be managed and measured without understanding its mechanisms on the ground, or treating it as the cultural dimension of citizenship and conflating it with civic duties. Her brief addresses this gap by grounding cultural citizenship in empirical research conducted between 2021 and 2022 across ten art organisations in the UK, Southern Europe and the Americas. The research involved twenty-one interviews with museum directors and public programmers across education, outreach and engagement departments, and investigated public programmes as social process rather than curatorial practice, with particular interest in place-based, public-facing practices delivered mainly in person through participatory formats.

The findings suggest that place-based public programmes emerge as strategic sites of cultural citizenship, providing a space for democratic innovation through situated, collective cultural practice. Operating at the intersection of departments and straddling the inside and outside of museums, these programmes bring together communities of cultural citizens through collective practice and can promote collective action and belonging. They become a liminal space, both relationally, where staff and local communities can meet, and physically, where the everyday politics of the neighbourhood colour the practices of the museum and are coloured by them in the process. One exemplar is Museo Situado at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, an active collaboration network between the museum and local associations operating through monthly assemblies. Another comes from Santiago de Chile, where the director of the Museo Salvador Allende explained how, during the social uprising of October 2019, the team decided to close the exhibitions and open the museum to the community, making the museum available to the social process of the neighbourhood, with programming that included local cabildos, wellbeing workshops and talks on the new constituent process.

From this evidence base, Gigante distils a tripartite framework recognising three fundamental spheres of such work: spatial, relational and political. The spatial sphere concerns the physical environments where activities are carried out, in the gallery or other locations in the neighbourhood, and the symbolic meanings attached to them. The relational sphere captures the inherently collective and interpersonal nature of place-based cultural practice. The political sphere is about understanding the power dynamics of cultural production in place, from deciding whose voices are heard to what structures of solidarity can be implemented. The framework is useful for translating abstract principles of participation and social cohesion into practice: through conversations with community members it might become evident that a particular community is facing a particular issue, which will then require the activation of specific structures of solidarity. Building takeovers, where communities lead or curate activities in the museum, such as the Takeover Programme at Mansions of the Future, show how physical infrastructure can be the point of departure for citizen-led cultural practice relevant to place and responsive to community needs.

The relational infrastructure emerges as at once the strongest and the most fragile pillar of cultural citizenship practice. It includes relationships within departments, crucially curatorial, learning and engagement, relationships with communities, and cross-sector partnerships. Despite being considered soft, relational infrastructure is what sustains institutions by providing them with relevance and legitimacy. Yet the research revealed structural fragilities: relational work is crucial to a project’s success but often invisible in institutional structures, and high staff turnover during the pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of this work, often described as exhausting and demanding. Local knowledge and trust-building reside with staff directly involved in place-based practice, shaped by the individual values and sensitivity of postholders, which makes this labour both powerful and difficult to sustain and transfer. Funding patterns compound the problem, as project-based structures reward novelty and wide reach, whereas place-based work is most successful with small numbers over time. When museums are already struggling to overcome mistrust from local communities, short-term project-based engagement risks causing more harm than good.

The cross-cultural evidence informed a Model for Progressive Cultural Citizenship Praxis, a tool that cultural leaders can use to interrogate existing programming and guide the design of new work. The recommendations are directed at both organisations and funders. Cultural organisations are advised to foster cross-departmental interactions, improve the visibility and documentation of public programmes to enable study of their long-term impact, work within and beyond the physical site in response to communities’ felt experience of place, make resources available to local communities including skills and use of space, embed local expertise as a strategic input, and deliver programmes reflecting the diversity of local communities, from tours in multiple languages to community-led skillshares. Funders are urged to reframe funding criteria that embrace open-ended outcomes and evaluation frameworks capturing impact as depth instead of spread, valuing longevity over numbers, incremental meaningful change over novelty, and deepening relationships over constantly reaching new groups, and to design funding cycles that support co-production with continuity.

As cultural institutions observe incremental shifts toward participatory governance, the brief concludes that the challenge is not only to recognise the value of relational labour and its potential for social cohesion within public programming, but to equip it with adequate infrastructure through funding models that value long-term commitment to communities, evaluation frameworks that go beyond quantitative metrics, and institutional practice that makes space for slowness and care. Strengthening mechanisms for participatory and democratic decision-making, such as citizen assemblies like the Voice Assembly at New Art Exchange in Nottingham and community critical friends such as the Cultural Citizens at Eastside Projects, points toward a sector where museums deliver on their civic and democratic aspirations. Fostering citizen-led cultural practice, the research suggests, requires risk-taking and a willingness to embrace complexity, reflexivity and collective leadership, because it is also work that cannot be done in isolation.

Subject of Research: Cultural citizenship, museums, public programming, participatory governance, cultural policy

Article Title: Cultural citizenship through museums’ place-based public programmes: an evidence-based framework for cultural policy and organisations

Article References: Gigante, L. (2026). Cultural citizenship through museums’ place-based public programmes: an evidence-based framework for cultural policy and organisations. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16375. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16375

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16375

Keywords: Cultural, citizenship, museums, place-based, public, programmes, evidence-based, framework, policy, organisations, scientific research