BEYOND: Culture Action Europe’s strategic framework for joint advocacy

BEYOND is Culture Action Europe’s core strategic framework for reflection, active listening and joint advocacy across the cultural and creative sectors in Europe. It provides a space to explore bold, radical visions for the future while advancing core principles such as cultural democracy, ethical leadership, and cultural rights. BEYOND is designed to sustain a continuous and structured process of co-creation and consultation that both informs Culture Action Europe’s advocacy work and strengthens the broader cultural ecosystem across Europe.

The BEYOND structure also serves as a two-way bridge between the cultural sector and policymakers. On one hand, it encodes the experiences, needs, and proposals of the cultural and creative sectors into CAE’s advocacy at the European and national levels. It transforms distributed, localised knowledge into a coherent and collective voice. At the same time, it helps decode EU cultural policy developments and bring them to the field. Through BEYOND, Culture Action Europe makes complex institutional processes accessible, tangible and actionable for cultural actors on the ground.

The BEYOND structure is composed of two interlinked formats:

Central BEYONDa biennial flagship gathering convened by Culture Action Europe

Satellite BEYONDa series of decentralised, regional events hosted by CAE members

Together, these two formats create a biennial cycle of engagement that alternates between centralised and decentralised modes of interaction. This cyclical structure ensures that CAE’s work is both rooted in the lived realities of cultural practitioners and is responsive to evolving policy landscapes at the national and European levels.

This strategic interplay between central and satellite BEYONDs, reinforces Culture Action Europe’s role as a connector and translator between grassroots cultural realities and institutional policymaking.