The study, published in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, was conducted by Tran Minh Duc of Thu Dau Mot University in Vietnam. It examines how policy terms with different administrative statuses are interpreted within Vietnam’s governance of cultural and creative industries, a field that spans arts and heritage, media, design, digital production, software, entrepreneurship, tourism and urban creativity. Rather than asking what the terms mean conceptually, the research follows what happens to them once they enter official policy arenas.

The evidence base is deliberately bounded. Duc drew on seventeen documentary sources—sixteen official policy or administrative texts and one independent field assessment—alongside eight official speeches, public statements and policy announcements, and ten focal participant records generated through semi-structured interviews and field-based consultations or observations between 2022 and 2024. The documentary corpus begins with Decision No. 1755/QD-TTg, the 2016 executive decision that formally introduced cultural industries, or “cong nghiep van hoa,” as a national category and listed twelve constituent sectors: advertising, architecture, software and digital entertainment, handicrafts, design, film, publishing, broadcasting, performing arts, visual arts, photography and cultural tourism.

From this material, the study distils four interpretive processes it calls delimiting, legitimating, coordinating and reconfiguring. Delimiting concerns classification: what activities fall within the field and where its boundaries are drawn. Legitimating concerns perceived institutional fit—why a particular organisation seems an appropriate participant. Coordinating concerns how actors communicate across organisational boundaries, and reconfiguring tracks who becomes involved as the field evolves. The framework emerged iteratively from theory-informed interpretation and open qualitative coding, guided by boundary-work scholarship, the concept of boundary objects, institutional-work research and interpretive policy analysis.

The delimiting findings are the clearest. Decision No. 1755/QD-TTg states that the cultural industries are an important constituent part of the national economy, and later ministerial statistical and reporting instruments continued to place related activities within established cultural, sports, tourism and administrative reporting systems. Interviews both supported and qualified this reading. One participant described the strategy as providing a clear legal basis for placing cultural industries in statistical categories and annual planning, while another characterised the term as an administrative categorisation that made an economically productive field more visible to the state. But a representative of a large digital creative enterprise offered a pointed counter-case: “We produce digital content, distribute it through apps, combine it with e-commerce and AI—so which sub-sector do we belong to? The administrative system cannot classify us.”

Field observation reinforced the qualification. In one local implementation meeting concerning a proposed Digital Art and Urban Design Week, the cultural authority claimed responsibility for artistic content while the information-and-communications authority claimed authority over digital infrastructure and augmented- and virtual-reality components. Neither accepted responsibility for a single-window approval process, and the issue was referred upward to the city government. The language of “digital creative space” did not settle the boundary; it exposed how a hybrid activity could trigger competing sectoral jurisdictions. Formal classification, the study concludes, was most inadequate precisely where digital, commercial and cultural functions were combined.

On the legitimating dimension, the Cultural Development Strategy to 2030 links cultural development to national identity, cultural values, social development and sustainable development while giving the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism a central implementation role. Participants described how new terminology had to be anchored in heritage, national identity, public value and established cultural responsibilities to be administratively acceptable. Yet actors also translated the same projects into different vocabularies for different audiences: one project coordinator’s monitoring notes recorded that with local authorities the emphasis fell on cultural revitalisation, local heritage and community service, while with investors the emphasis shifted to entrepreneurship, innovation, digital value chains and sustainable business models. Culture-oriented language sustained continuity with established mandates; innovation and entrepreneurship language supplied additional justifications. Neither, the study stresses, conferred legal authority.

The coordinating findings are the most cautious. The 2021 Cultural Development Strategy explicitly calls for an inter-agency coordination mechanism, which the author reads as documenting an unresolved need rather than achieved coordination. Participants described creative economy and cultural-creative industries as useful “common discussion frames” for bringing cultural, planning, information and finance actors into the same conversation, but added that when implementation begins, everything becomes stuck on jurisdiction. One participant warned that creative-economy language could become a “shell” for inter-agency discussion unless accompanied by concrete tax, digital-copyright, finance and regulatory-sandbox instruments. A fieldnote from a budget discussion makes the distinction concrete: cultural officials invoked the 2016 strategy to justify support for design innovation in the handicraft sector, but finance officials classified the proposed activities as commercial rather than public cultural expenditure, and the proposal stalled because the cultural-industries category did not map onto existing budget classifications.

The reconfiguring dimension concerns Hanoi’s creative-city agenda. Hanoi’s Resolution No. 09-NQ/TU connects cultural-industry development with the objective to build, develop and position the UNESCO “Creative City” brand, and a municipal plan and an official review report for 2019 to 2023 document implementation and performance reporting. A separate independent field-monitoring assessment records legal-identity, public-property and inter-organisational barriers experienced by creative hubs. Participants described creative-city governance as opening policy processes to independent experts, artists and creative businesses while leaving budgets, planning approval and final decision authority within the existing administrative system. One independent hub operator, whose account is supported by a verbatim transcript, said that hybrid spaces “completely depend on government recognition” because their legal and licensing status remains difficult to classify. Widened participation was tangible—advisory mechanisms, hub-mediated representation, co-produced design festivals—but it remained conditional, project-based and institutionally dependent.

The study’s broader lesson is about evidentiary status rather than semantics. “Cultural industries” has the strongest basis as a formally codified national category; “creative city” functions mainly as urban-development and implementation vocabulary; and “creative industries,” “creative economy,” “cultural-creative industries” and “creative hub” are supported more strongly as interpretive, adjacent-policy or practitioner vocabularies than as formally equivalent national categories. Each pattern also has a clear limit: classification did not settle jurisdiction, normative fit did not confer legal authority, shared vocabulary did not substitute for formal coordination, and wider participation did not amount to structural governance transformation. The case connects most clearly to the digital and social or institutional dimensions of the so-called triple transition; the data contain no comparably developed indication that environmental or low-carbon objectives were integrated into CCI administrative practice during the 2016 to 2024 study period. The author is candid about the design’s limits: a qualitative single-country case with a small purposive sample cannot establish that terminology causes governance outcomes, nor that it is more influential in Vietnam than in institutionally consolidated systems. What the case does show is that in a governance environment where responsibilities remain only partly consolidated, official terminology can serve as an administrative reference point—while legal mandates, budget rules, organisational history and political incentives determine what can actually be authorised, funded and implemented.

Subject of Research: How policy terminology is administratively interpreted in Vietnam's governance of cultural and creative industries

Article Title: Policy terminology, administrative interpretation, and cultural and creative industries governance: evidence from Vietnam’s transitional policy context

Article References: Duc, T. M. (2026). Policy terminology, administrative interpretation, and cultural and creative industries governance: evidence from Vietnam’s transitional policy context. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 17546. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.17546

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.17546

Keywords: cultural and creative industries, policy terminology, Vietnam, governance, administrative classification, creative city, boundary work, cultural policy, qualitative case study, inter-agency coordination, creative hubs, UNESCO Creative City