Diana Betzler

The understanding of resilience, and how the ability to respond or adjust to new situations can be implemented and evaluated, gained prominence in public policy. This study examines how European Union (EU) member states plan to support cultural and creative sectors (CCSs) within the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) of the NextGenerationEU Program and how they plan the CCSs to contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Using mixed methods, it is found that the understanding of how structural deficiencies in CCSs can be addressed is not systematic and not all countries invest to make the cultural infrastructure more future‐proof. Neither the budgets nor the mode of resilience (absorption, adaptation, and transformation) exposed in the plans consistently correlates with how countries intend to address key impact pillars. Countries with larger CCSs are more prone to transformation. The theoretical contribution lies in the elaboration of the concept of “ex ante resilience.”

Even if crises have the capacity to reveal the structural problems that underlie the various components of social systems, little systematic knowledge exists on how museums respond to these situations. Combining what is known about how museums reacted to previous crisis and empirical evidence of how museums recently adjusted their activities and strategies, the article highlights how art museums in Western Europe started to tackle the ambivalent challenge to pursue social purposes while being urged to monetize possible assets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, art museums have adopted ‘emergency’ and ‘emerging’ strategies associated with the modification of the funding mix, new partnerships and collaborations, and sustainable financing. The offer of digital services, a moderate reliance on crowdfunding, blockchain technologies, and an increased sensitivity of community needs, are among the novelties that art museums engaged with. Forerunners that had started with such practices before the pandemic, had the opportunity to take these to the next level.

This Special Issue seeks to address the perennial question of support options for the cultural and creative industries (exacerbated due to the impact of COVID-19) by bringing together articles that examine and explain various dynamics in CCI financing and funding. The articles in the Issue are diverse in their approaches, methods and data. They range from conceptual, qualitative, and case studies, to analyses based on survey data and granular ‘big data’. The articles mainly address digital fundraising technologies and investment practices. Strikingly absent in this collection of studies are modes of funding in which governments and public providers occupy center stage. Innovation in financing and funding appears to be more the result of new modalities (i.e., technology-driven) than of fundamental shifts in thoughts about how the cultural economy could be approached and how the CCI should be financially sustained. The articles in the Issue suggest the emergence of a new funding paradigm, which steps away from a clear demarcation between public and private in terms of interests and financing modes. This new paradigm embraces collaborative funding mechanisms such as crowdfunding, incubator and accelerator finance, and other pooled investments, as well as digital fundraising technologies that facilitate new modes of asset finance and tokenized funding. Future research themes are being suggested: the merging of project funding with structural budgets, the emergence of new business models and improved labor market conditions due to technology-driven aids, shifts in transaction costs, and issues related to regulation and legislation.

The present study entails an analysis of the early measures and policies developed by five smaller and medium-sized European countries (the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland) in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In order to enable such a comparison, data was collected and categorised on government measures that could affect cultural and creative organizations and workers, issued by departments as diverse as economy and business, social affairs, education, and culture. By using interpretative argumentative techniques, and consideration of selected context factors, possible explanatory patterns of how and why countries have implemented which types of measures are discussed. The findings highlight that early policy measures have been developed against the backdrop of a complex interplay of public policy priorities over the last years. In these priorities the intensity of state involvement, the economic situation before the pandemic and the propensity of self-employment in society are key to understanding the adoption of specific policy measures across countries.

This article deals with the question of whether regional cultural competence centers foster the diversity of cultural expressions and how the objectives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Convention on Cultural Diversity are implemented. By introducing the Convention on Cultural Diversity, the conditions of regional cultural policy governance, and the idea of regional cultural competence centers, a framework for evaluation is outlined. The evaluation of four regional cultural competence centers in the Swiss Central Region shows that fostering cultural diversity is complex and has many different approaches and effects. The final discussion concludes that principles such as “interculturality,” “freedom,” and “access for all” under the Convention on Cultural Diversity can promote a diversity of cultural expressions but that these criteria have to be set from outside—for example, by public funding institutions—so that regional actors implement them.

Digitalisation transforms creative value chains significantly. For the film and game production, experts assume that this process comes along with an increasing convergence. This article aims to identify and discuss possible convergences along the digitised value chains of the film and game industries. Based on a structured comparative analysis of the Swiss film and game industries, we explore framework conditions and stages of value creation. Taking into account a comprehensive desk research on the impact of digitalisation on the value creation in creative industries and interviews with Swiss industry experts, we found out that despite different production styles and cultures, the Swiss game and film industries show signs of convergence like, e.g. in the animation of content. However, one of the main challenges when it comes to film and game cooperations, remains to develop genuinely transmedial products and content that is specific to convergences and technologies used (e.g. Virtual Reality).