From Government to Governance
Berlin’s cultural administration is making an effort to formalize communication with artist stakeholders and associations, which they hope will lead to an increase in trust in politics, and, in the long-term, the quality of policies themselves. For example, initiatives such as Jours Fixes bring together the cultural administration and genre-specific art associations or artist advocacy bodies like the Koalition. While these forums are not open to the general public, they do facilitate the communication and knowledge-exchange between artists engaged in political groups and the official policy-makers, making the exchange of ideas steadier.
Lederer considers political dialogue in general to be a “permanent process of searching and readjusting.” While Knoch believes an openness to search for new solutions to artists’ problems is commendable, he is not quite satisfied with this answer. “The elected party, the official side, will always be there, but there has to be an ‘Other’ to talk to,” he says. “How to stabilize the position of the more unstable conversation partners whom the official side will address, and how to make it work so that the informal side continues to exist?”
Knoch advocates for the cultural administration to provide structural (monetary) support and security to self-organized actors to avoid, or at least decrease, the constant fluctuation of meeting attendees, which can lead to a potential loss of knowledge and trust on both sides.
Lederer views politicians as more stable and secure than what Knoch calls the “informed and organized civil society” and, on top of being worried about “funding something to its own death,” states that “the financial support of spontaneous forms of civil engagement does not work.” While it’s unclear what Lederer means when he says government funding of civil society advocacy bodies would “not work,” what does become apparent is his belief in the controversy inherent in Knoch’s request for funding artist advocacy bodies. He also believes that whether or not support for civil society actors is granted is a political decision.
In contrast to Knoch’s view that self-organized groups like the Koalition should be funded externally—either publicly or privately—Lederer finds that “structures of self-organization need to be secured by these actors themselves, and, to be able to do that, the social dimension of cultural funding needs to be strengthened.” This “social dimension” touches on the controversial topic of whether governments should provide funding support to individual artists or whether they should invest in more general cultural institutions or infrastructures.
Lederer makes it clear that the responsibility to “stay in the game”—or to participate in discussions about how to distribute the budget—lies primarily on artist-activist stakeholders themselves. However, this is difficult for the artists. They have no resources to support or compensate their volunteer work and have no guarantee that their voices will be heard or that change will come. The question: “What kind of organization could ensure long-term exchange between official political actors and artist-activists?” remains open.
[I]n times where artists have mobilized the cultural scenes to speak up against the imbalance of funding, the administration has been under more pressure to face this inequality.
Arguably, since the creation of the Koalition, there has been a paradigmatic shift in Berlin’s cultural politics from government to governance—from top-down management, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, towards more fluid political arrangements, which temporarily include non-state actors from civil society and business. While there were certainly collaborations between artist-advocates and the cultural administration beforehand, the new cultural administration under Lederer is increasingly reliant on self-organized civil actors: “We are dependent on either using self-organized artist-network structures, or, if they do not exist yet, to encourage their formation.” This “dependence” refers to the fact that the official political side cannot satisfy all needs of artists (or even know about them!) and needs self-organized artist-activists with context-specific expertise and experience to adjust their policy changes accordingly: in times where artists have mobilized the cultural scenes to speak up against the imbalance of funding, the administration has been under more pressure to face this inequality.
In other words, the cultural administration needs self-organized groups to mediate, moderate, and bundle the myriad of political ideas for change that exist in the various cultural scenes. However, the administration also partially deprioritizes the political wishes or recommendations requested by artist associations when they design—or do not design—new policy instruments based on their own criteria of “artistic excellence.”
For example, individual-artist grant funding has not been advanced to the extent requested by the Koalition, while a lot more funds from the cultural budget are now invested in festivals. In Berlin, some policy achievements in the past years, such as the introduction of an Eigenmittelfonds (matching fund), equipped with five hundred thousand euros, and a Wiederaufnahmefonds (revival fund), equipped with a million euros, are directly related to claims advanced by the Koalition in their Ten-Point-Plan (now morphed into an Eleven-Point-Program). Overall, political progress and policy innovations depend both on the openness of the administration and on the persistence of the self-organized actors to verbalize claims that go beyond their personal situations and problems.
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