Between radical thinking and advocacy pragmatism: Reflections from Mondiacult 2025  

Lars Ebert, Secretary General of Culture Action Europe, participated in the official Mondiacult 2025 programme and the Civic Agora in Barcelona, representing Culture Action Europe in various panel discussions and as part of the Culture2030Goal campaign. Mondiacult also presented a suitable context to launch Culture Action Europe’s Culture Compass Sector Blueprint to EU and national decision makers. 

 The Culture2030Goal campaign, launched in 2013 by a global coalition of cultural networks—including Culture Action Europe (CAE), IFACCA, UCLG, ICOM and others—emerged from a shared conviction: culture is the missing pillar of sustainable development. While the 2030 Agenda recognises culture’s role implicitly, it lacks an explicit cultural goal. Over the past years, the coalition has worked tirelessly to fill that gap—building evidence, engaging with the UN system, and articulating a vision of culture as a driver and enabler of sustainability. 

At Mondiacult 2025 in Barcelona, the coalition unveiled the 1.0 draft of the Culture Goal, a framework that defines culture as both a human right and a foundation for sustainable futures. The Culture2030 Goal Campaign has invited the global cultural community to engage in an open, co-creative process toward a final proposal by 2027, when the future of the Sustainable Development Goals will be reviewed at the United Nations in New York. As part of the campaign steering group, CAE had also asked feedback from our members. This collective drafting process resulted in a proposal that is structured around a set of indicators addressing cultural rights and diversity, equitable access to and participation in culture, safeguarding of tangible and intangible heritage, fair working conditions for cultural workers, and the integration of culture across education, environment, and peacebuilding agendas. 

I had the honour of representing Culture Action Europe in the panel that launched this first draft during the Civic Agora, a space for independent civic reflection running parallel to the official UNESCO programme. In my contribution I highlighted a perspective on the culture goal that is situated in EU Cultural Policy.  

As in the EU the competence for culture lies primarily with member states, the project of Europe as a cultural space open to the world is complicated. We keep using the term ´cultural policy´, which UNESCO has helped coin after WW2 to preserve national identity at a time when states feared losing their distinctiveness in a globalised world driven by trade, technology, and multilateral cooperation. That legacy still anchors culture in the nation-state.   

Yet Culture2030Goal points beyond borders: it treats culture as a truly global endeavor and calls for a level of coordination no single state can deliver. It calls for rethinking culture as a supranational competence. Culture now intersects more globally, and so should cultural policies. All of this pushes culture beyond the nation-state and toward supranational policy: the digital environment for creation and AI is now borderless; the sustainability agenda is coordinated transnationally; the mental-health ‘pandemic’ is as much individual as it is global; and artists’ mobility, wars and displacement, as well as heritage protection require shared standards and joint emergency tools.  

Seen through this lens, the ambition for a standalone Culture Goal builds beyond traditional national cultural policy. It frames culture as a universal right and a universal public good, applicable to everyone, everywhere.   

For advocacy, this implies new modes of policy-making, in line with the cultural democracy paradigm. Stronger international cooperation, participatory and decentralised governance models, digital cultural rights, Creative Commons, investment into cultural infrastructure and cultural participation.  

I believe that overcoming the limitations posed by the principle of subsidiarity will still respect national cultural competences at the member states while at the same time establish a transnational competence for culture that recognises the border crossing nature of cultural workers, creative processes and cultural goods. It would strategically boost the transformative potential of culture that is so much needed,- both as a foundation of open and plural societies and democracies as well as a transversal power that enables other policy agendas, such as well-being or security.  

Seen through this lens, the ambition for a standalone Culture Goal aligns with a broader evolution towards a supranational cultural competence—a shared responsibility for culture at the European and global levels. This would allow the EU to embrace culture not merely as symbolic soft power, but as a strategic resource for democratic resilience, social inclusion, and sustainable development. 

To sum up: a Culture Goal will strengthen our advocacy to transition from a substitute cultural policy to a real cultural competence for the EU. But this demands more than good policy, it requires political will. 

Mondiacult 2025: Connecting the Global and European Agendas  

The Final Declaration of Mondiacult 2025 calls for culture to be integrated as a distinct goal in any post-2030 global framework—reflecting the tireless advocacy of the Culture2030Goal coalition and its allies. 

The next phase will be decisive. From now until September 2027, the coalition must continue refining the goal’s architecture, building statistical credibility for its indicators, and consolidating political alliances at global and regional levels. This work will require sustained dialogue with national governments, the European Union, UN agencies, and civil society to secure broad consensus and institutional anchoring for a Culture Goal as part of the future development agenda. 

Mondiacult 2025 also provided an invaluable opportunity to strengthen the European dimension of this global advocacy effort. In the margins of the conference, I was able to meet with a range of decision makers, including EU Commissioner for Culture Glenn Micaleff, CULT Committee Chair Nela Riehl, and Spain’s Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun, the host of Mondiacult. In these exchanges, I presented Culture Action Europe’s Sector Blueprint for a Culture Compass—a strategic framework designed to inform European cultural policy in a rapidly changing world. The Blueprint sets out a vision for culture as a common good, a democratic right, and a transformative force in Europe’s social, ecological, and digital transitions. 

As I elaborated in a recent interview for Creative Unite, “artists must be free, and culture must be instrumental—but not instrumentalised.” This notion captures the essence of CAE’s advocacy: culture should serve societal transformation, yet remain autonomous from narrow political or economic agendas. The Sector Blueprint Culture Compass builds on this conviction, offering a navigational tool for aligning EU cultural policies with the needs of the sector and broader sustainability, well-being, and democratic resilience agendas. 

By engaging with EU institutions, national governments and global stakeholders in Barcelona, CAE reaffirmed its ambition to integrate the global perspective in the European advocacy and cultural policy debates.  

A Broader Lens: Between Radical Thinking and Policy Pragmatism  

The Civic Agora sessions that paralleled the official Mondiacult programme offered a crucial space for reflection and critique, such as for Justin O’Connor, who reminds us that the pursuit of a Culture Goal must not become as a bureaucratic exercise in a context that is caught up by global developments. O’Connor argues for a radical rethinking of culture’s role in confronting the social and ecological crises of our time and calls to reclaim culture as a field of democratic imagination and social transformation. The challenge ahead is to bridge this valid radical intellectual critique with the policy-oriented advocacy necessary to achieve tangible outcomes within global governance systems. 

The call for a Culture Goal is in that sense more than a campaign. It opens a discourse that reflects an inevitable paradigm shift. It invites us to move beyond 20th century notions of cultural policy rooted in national identity, and to embrace culture as a universal right and a global public good. Such a shift requires new modes of policymaking: participatory, cross-border, and grounded in cultural democracy.  

And then, please, when we talk about cultural policy, let us start with talks about culture and politics. Justin O´Connor quite rightly points at the tricky nature of this couple. Culture can be politically abused, and freedom of artistic expression and autonomy of our institutions must be protected at all costs. Yet, all our pleas for a stronger empowerment of the cultural sector depend on political will. We need a political narrative that affirms everyone’s right and the opportunity not only to access culture, but also to create, shape, and participate in collective decision-making. In this sense, culture is vital to politics. So let´s end culture’s depoliticisation and recognise it as a democratic force. Yes, we need data-driven advocacy to ´prove´ culture’s impact, but without a political vision, we are lost. 

Photo Credit: UNESCO
Visual description: Participants in a traditional Catalan human tower, or “castell,” stand shoulder to shoulder in red shirts, locking arms to support climbers above. This centuries-old practice, recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage, symbolises strength, trust, and collective identity in Catalan culture.