Arts festivals and cultural diversity policy. An insight in the tension fields between cultural policy and arts festivals

Abstract

Arts festivals have become important stakeholders in the current cultural field, and their importance is ever-growing. However, critics from the cultural sector have stated that current cultural policy does not take this specific form of cultural organizations enough and adequately into account and hereby fails to create a healthy, future-proof cultural climate in the Netherlands. This thesis tests this assumption by studying how three Dutch arts festivals implement one specific form of cultural policy and which obstacles they experience with this. The chosen form of policy is cultural diversity policy, a type of policy that has been growing in importance the last 20 years, like the arts festivals themselves. The findings suggests an array of tension fields, and it may indeed be so that current cultural policies are not fully equipped to deal with the dynamic arts festival platform. This makes policy implementation for the arts festivals sometimes difficult and inefficient, and suggests that in the future, a different approach would be welcomed.