Promoting an economy for sustaining a thriving culture in Europe
This essay is written by CAE Board Member Rocío Nogales Muriel, Executive Director of the EMES International Research Network & Vice-President of SmartIb cooperative.
A crucial moment for the future of Europe
Europe is currently making a series of critical policy decisions that will shape its capacity to respond to the challenges of next decades. Such a process involves, among other things, restructuring key industrial policies and revitalising areas that citizens feel have been left behind. All the while, responding to the return of the war in Europe and steadily rising levels of poverty and inequality in our societies.
All of these decisions are being drawn-up against a majority of European citizens consumed by everyday pressures like paying rent amid skyrocketing housing costs; working multiple jobs; managing mental health issues with their own limited resources and trying to find enough time to care for their loved ones, participate in community life or enjoy leisure and cultural activities.
Against this backdrop, two areas of practice and policy that are crucial for European societies are currently under scrutiny. Major strategies are developed or revised, alongside the decisions around the budgets and resources needed to implement them. In the cultural field, the Council is preparing the next European Work Plan for Culture, following the Commission’s publication of the Culture Compass as a broader roadmap for the sector and the Member States. In parallel, the social economy has recently welcomed the mid-term review of its Action Plan, approved in December 2021.
What culture and the social economy represent
Mind you: in 2024 culture employed about 7.9 million people and included 2.1 million cultural enterprises across the EU generating around €202 billion value added (1.9% of the total business economy). The cultural sector’s net turnover reached €524 billion, 1.4% of the total net turnover generated within the EU’s business economy in 2023.
As for the social economy, latest data shows that it generates 13.6 million jobs, which represents around 6.3% of total employment, through more than 4.3 million social economy organisations. Taken together, the proximity and social economy ecosystem is estimated to account between 6% and 8% of EU GDP.
The quantitative data is important. But the value and contributions of culture and the social economy to Europe’s wellbeing and sustainability extend far beyond statistics and tangible assets. They spread into the les visible structures that hold societies and communities together.
What culture and the social economy contribute
Culture and the arts constitute the undeniable area of human activity that nurtures creativity and excellence, strengthens community and shared responsibility and helps shape Europe’s common future. Cultural production and participation are pillars for lively, welcoming and caring communities across Europe, including in its most peripheral areas, grounded in democratic values and respect for diversity. Moreover, artists and cultural agents create culture while also acting as committed citizens who care for the health and well-being of their communities.
Social economy organisations combine their social, environmental and economic objectives through a myriad of citizen-led initiatives that contribute to dignified working conditions while knitting the social fabric of our cities and villages across Europe. Affordable housing, renewable energy, food sovereignty, reuse, recycling and repair, quality care services, sustainable tourism or solidarity finance are among the many areas in which social economy organisations are active. Culture and the arts are also part of this landscape, although there remains considerable room for development.
Actors in both areas are aware of the damaging impact that ‘business as usual’ has had on the planet and are actively working to render their inherent strengths more visible and to ensure fair and sustainable climate transitions.
Culture and the social economy: aligning potentials to strengthen joint action
Indeed, several promising areas for cross-pollination already exist, and many more will emerge as we create space for this fruitful interaction. In 2024, for instance, nearly one in three cultural workers (31.7%) were self-employed. This leaves a substantial part of the cultural workforce with limited bargaining power, reduced access to social protection and fewer opportunities to organise collectively and advocate for dignified working conditions.
The social economy defends the quality and dignity of the jobs it creates and encourages workers to self-organise to safeguard these conditions and ensure the continuity of their economic activity. Worker cooperatives across Europe offer unique examples of this. In Spain, worker-owned enterprises (sociedades laborales) allow workers to buy out their previously failed company and maintain its continuity. Similarly, the entrepreneurial impulse cooperative form in Spain (cooperativa de impulso empresarial) allows its members to organise collectively, mutualise services and organise cooperative governance while developing and incubating cultural projects.
The majority of the EU cultural sector is composed of small and medium-sized enterprises, making cultural and artistic social enterprises a distinctive form of enterprise that generates both participatory and social value. Established institutional forms that support the cultural and social missions of social economy organisations already exist in countries like Bulgaria, where citizen-governed cultural centres (chitalishta) were created at the end of XIX century.
The mid-term review of the Social Economy Action Plan, although mildly, gives culture a place and highlights its connection to sustainable tourism.
Inspiring actions at Member State level: The case of the Social Economy Agenda for Culture
EU Member States are gradually developing policies conducive to the consolidation of social economy organisations and expanding understanding of the potential of culture beyond traditional institutional frameworks. France has been a reference on how to support the mutually enriching nature of culture and the arts and the social economy via organisations like OPALE and innovative legal forms like Coopérative d’activité et d’emploi (Activity and Employment Cooperative).
More recently, as part of the wider Cultural Rights Plan launched in the summer of 2025, Spain has launched a participatory process for drawing up the Social Economy Agenda for Culture. Within the Plan, Measure 120 (Support for cultural models of the social economy) aims to promote models of the social economy in the cultural sector, facilitating the creation and strengthening of cooperatives, associations and other social ecoomy organisations which operate in the cultural sector.
Measure 120 will be developed via a participatory process aiming to collaboratively develop a wide range of actions to strengthen these organisations in Spain. It will include three phases throughout summer and fall 2026: 1) An ideation and proposal design workshop; 2) A measure consolidation workshop; and 3) A measure review workshop:
- Representatives from the cultural sector and the social economy will be invited to share assessments, identify the sectors’ needs and opportunities and formulate a range of proposals and ideas that can be developed into concrete measures. The initial diagnosis, structures around seven work axes, draws on previous research and interviews with experts.
- The primary proposals and ideas will be refined through the process of selection, definition and finalisation. This stage will result in the drafting of concrete measures for the Social Economy Agenda for Culture.
- A feedback session will be organised to present the proposed measures for the review. Following this, the measures will be incorporated into the final Agenda, which will be presented by the end of the 2026.
Leveraging the power of networks at the European level
As bottom-up representative bodies of two ecosystems that have traditionally had limited contact, Culture Action Europe and Social Economy Europe are well placed to support and give visibility to initiatives that connect the two fields. As networks of networks, they bring together federations, organisations and practitioners across Europe that are closely rooted in their territories and local realities.
In some countries, the social economy and cultural sector are already moving closer, exchanging knowledge and learning from one another. Strengthening this mutual understanding alongside the development of concrete tools and measures, can help cultural agents to build sustainable organisations and support an independent cultural ecosystem, capable of responding to the complexities and uncertainties of our times.
Spanish poet Gabriel Celaya wrote in 1955 that “poetry is a weapon loaded of future”. These words have inspired thousands of artivists to defend poetry (and culture more widely) as a building block for solid, participatory and transparent democracies. Creating the conditions for the social economy and culture to connect and thrive together would add to this effort of jointly co-building such livable and joyful futures.