The other giant in the room: the Council’s Work Plan for Culture
Over the past months, we’ve talked a lot about the European Commission’s work on the Culture Compass and the European Parliament’s efforts to influence the current funding proposals. With negotiations on the next long-term EU budget gathering pace, both institutions are busy trying to shape what comes next for culture. But there is a third player in the room that we cannot afford to overlook: the Council of the EU.
Let’s keep it simple.
If the European Commission is the institution that proposes legislations, and manages programmes and fundings, while the European Parliament is the directly elected body representing citizens, the Council of the EU is where national governments sit around the table. It brings together ministers from all Member States to negotiate and adopt EU policies, ensuring that European ambitions remain connected to national realities.
And yes, culture has a seat at that table too, even though cultural policies remain primarily a national competence. What the EU can do is support cooperation, facilitate exchanges and encourage countries to work together on shared challenges.
That is precisely where the Work Plan comes in.
What is the Work Plan for Culture?
Every four years, the Council adopts a Work Plan for Culture: a document agreed by Member States that sets the priorities for cultural cooperation across Europe. Think of it as the EU’s cultural to-do list for the years ahead: the document does not create new legislation, nor does it directly allocate funding. Instead, it sets political priorities, launches working groups, encourages peer learning and identifies areas where Member States and EU institutions should cooperate more closely.
In policy jargon, this is often called “soft law”. In practice, it means that while the Work Plan is not legally binding, it can still shape agendas, influence national policies and steer future European initiatives.
The next Work Plan will cover the period 2027-2030 and is expected to be adopted under the Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU by the end of 2026. Although that may seem some way off, preparations have already begun, and a first draft is expected to emerge in early July.
This timing has turned out to be quite helpful, as it allowed Culture Action Europe to feed insights from the recently concluded BEYOND Satellites into the early stages of the process. The Satellites are Culture Action Europe’s decentralised advocacy space, designed to bring together voices from different regions and contexts and keep us connected to what is happening on the ground, beyond Brussels meetings. We asked our members what is working, what is not, and where they see the biggest gaps in coordination between the EU and Member States.
What did we find out?
Across regions, participants described a cultural sector facing growing pressure from political shifts, funding cuts and increasingly narrow understandings of cultural value. We consistently heard that culture is too often treated as a discretionary expense or assessed primarily through economic returns, rather than recognised as a public good that strengthens democracy and social cohesion.
Despite the diversity of contexts represented, two messages emerged consistently across all the regional gatherings:
- The need to recognise culture as a cross-sector driver of public value and to fund it accordingly:
Whether in health, education, climate action or territorial development, cultural actors continue to show their relevance across policy areas. Yet policy frameworks and funding programmes still tend to operate in silos, which makes long-term and cross-sector collaboration difficult, and sometimes pushes culture out of the picture altogether. The current direction of travel in programmes such as Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund, where culture risks losing a dedicated presence, is a clear example of a trend the sector has been consistently pushing back against: calling instead for culture to be both properly embedded across programmes and clearly recognised through earmarked support. - The limitations of current evaluation systems:
Many participants highlighted how funding and policy frameworks often prioritise short-term outputs, measurable deliverables based on quantitative indicators. Meanwhile, cultural practices rooted in participation, community engagement, care and long-term relationship-building struggle to fit existing definitions of impact. As negotiations on the next generation of EU funding programmes continue, this is an important moment to advocate for support structures that provide more sustainable conditions for cultural work.
What does this mean for the Work Plan?
This is where the connection with the Culture Compass and its accompanying Joint Declaration becomes particularly interesting. The Irish Presidency has expressed a clear interest in ensuring strong links between the Compass and the future Work Plan, creating continuity between the Commission’s long-term vision for culture and the practical cooperation mechanisms developed by Member States.
Such alignment could help consolidate an understanding of culture rooted in cultural democracy and cross-sectoral value, having very concrete implications at the same time. Flagship initiatives of the Compass such as the EU Cultural Data Hub and the State of Culture Report will play an important role in shaping how evidence about culture is gathered and interpreted across Europe. This matters because the way culture is measured often influences how it is approached in policy-making and the way it is funded and supported. If future data collection and evaluation frameworks recognise social engagement and long-term community impact, they could help move cultural policy beyond narrow economic indicators and towards a fuller understanding of cultural value.
The Work Plan alone cannot solve these challenges, but it can build the coordination, peer learning, and political ambition that Member States need to defend and support the sector. It can help Member States work together on issues that no country can tackle alone and encourage a stronger understanding of culture as a driver of democratic participation and social inclusion.
What happens next?
The Culture Compass is not the only area where the Irish Presidency is looking to break new ground. Another ambition emerging in the discussions around the Work Plan for Culture 2027–2030 is the exploration of new tools and practices that could strengthen coordination, knowledge-sharing and policy development beyond the mechanisms traditionally used by the Council.
One idea that Culture Action Europe’s network is currently exploring is the establishment of a more structured dialogue between cultural civil society and the Council of the EU. Unlike the European Commission and the European Parliament, engagement between the cultural sector and the Council often happens indirectly, through national ministries or occasional exchanges linked to specific policy processes, leaving no regular space for cultural stakeholders and Council representatives to discuss priorities in a systematic way.
The future Work Plan could help address this gap by setting up a structured dialogue mechanism, potentially in the form of a forum or roundtable meeting convened twice a year alongside the rotating Council Presidencies, bringing together cultural attachés and European cultural networks and organisations.
In parallel and in a similar way to the sector blueprint developed for the Culture Compass, we will soon publish a policy brief based on the consultations carried out across our members, with the aim of bringing the perspectives gathered through the BEYOND Satellites into the ongoing discussions and contribute to the development of the official Work Plan once the Council’s proposal is published.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the process and, as always, we’ll bring you along for the ride.