Arguments in favour of public support for arts and culture tend to focus on either their intrinsic benefits for social cohesion or their contribution to economic prosperity. Economist and professor Mariana Mazzucato argues that we should move beyond this binary by recognising the potential of culture to shape society’s imagination and redirect the economy from narrow GDP growth towards sustainability and public value.
Green European Journal: In the neoliberal framing, arts and culture are valued to the extent that they contribute to economic growth. In a recent paper, however, you argue that we should instead value their ability to shape the direction of economic growth. What’s the key difference?
Mariana Mazzucato: The dominant approach to measuring and appraising the value of arts and culture uses static methods like cost-benefit analysis that monetise short-term outcomes and inputs. More recently, countries have begun to value arts and culture’s immense economic multipliers in terms of jobs or gross value added. While these metrics are important, they tell us little about the type of growth being generated and whether it is inclusive, sustainable, or enriching for society. We need a shift towards valuing art and culture’s dynamic spillovers and market-shaping abilities.
In my paper “The Public Value of Arts and Culture”, I argue that arts and culture don’t just add to economic output; they reflect and shape what we value. They help us imagine the kind of society we want to build and therefore the kind of economy needed to get there. For example, our study with the BBC showed programming has the ability to shape markets. The corporation’s coverage of the 2019 Women’s Football World Cup catalysed new and inclusive markets for women’s sports broadcasting and influenced social norms.
While the creative industries in the UK contribute 124 billion pounds to the economy annually and have been identified as a high-growth sector, the arts also possess the ability to interrogate questions such as “What is economic growth for?” and “How does growth look and feel?” So rather than asking how investment in culture can boost growth, we should ask how it can direct growth towards public purpose. This is what it means to move from market fixing to market shaping.
We need a shift towards valuing art and culture’s dynamic spillovers and market-shaping abilities.
Could your vision perpetuate the instrumentalisation of culture by the economy, even while providing a more expansive notion of economic indicators than narrow GDP metrics?
In the literature, debates about arts and culture are often framed around a dichotomy between their “intrinsic” benefits, such as empathy, imagination, belonging, and their “instrumental” benefits, such as contributions to health, education, or urban regeneration. I believe we need to move beyond this binary. Arts and culture can be both a means and an end: a goal of economic policy as well as a precondition for economic transformation. As a “means”, arts and culture do more than simply represent their “sector” or “industry”. They are also an evolving set of practices that can be “used” to support ambitious missions such as net zero – by helping people to understand the urgency of climate action and to envision what economic transformation might look and feel like.
At the same time, arts and culture can also be their own “end”. From 2022, my team and I worked with the Barbados government and Prime Minister Mia Mottley to set out six missions – one of which focused on culture as the goal. Under the broader challenge of social cohesion, the mission aims to “transform Barbados into a society of active, involved citizens, where all Barbadians feel empowered and engaged in the social, economic, and cultural development of the country”.1
Rather than instrumentalising culture, this approach recognises that culture doesn’t just serve the economy – it shapes it. It helps define the purpose, values, and relationships on which a more inclusive and imaginative economy can be built.
Treating culture as an “industry” has led to declining state support. Should we abandon the “cultural and creative industries” framing altogether, or can we envision the likes of a bold industrial policy for the cultural sector?
Declining state support for arts and culture stems from insufficient ways of thinking about value and the role of the state, leading to austerity. When governments treat culture as an “industry,” they tend to justify public investment through a narrow market failure logic that intervenes too little, too late – when markets fall short, or when culture can demonstrate measurable returns in terms of jobs or GDP. This approach reduces the “cultural and creative industries” to something that competes for public resources rather than recognising arts and culture as an ecosystem that generates public value across the entire economy and society.
What we need instead is a mission-oriented approach to industrial policy.6 This means moving beyond focusing on specific “winning” industries and instead galvanising cross-sectoral collaboration to shape the direction of growth to deliver public value. In this approach, arts and culture are active contributors to defining what growth is for.
We cannot ignore the fact that there is an industry of people doing creative work. The point is not to abandon the idea of industrial policy but to reimagine and embed arts and culture in its design. We need an ambitious industrial strategy that is outcome oriented and invests in capabilities, institutions, and ecosystems – from arts education and public cultural institutions to creative practitioners and civic spaces that foster experimentation and participation. This is not about subsidising the arts but about co-creating the economy and society we want to live in.
The point is not to abandon the idea of industrial policy but to reimagine and embed arts and culture in its design.
Are there any positive examples the EU could take inspiration from in its approach to arts and culture?
Putting culture at the centre of economies is both an enormous challenge and a powerful lever that Europe must confront if it is serious about addressing its policy challenges.
That is why I find examples such as Barbados’s culture mission particularly inspiring. It reflects a government actively positioning culture as a mission and as a shared national endeavour that shapes the direction of growth itself. The mission recognises that investing in imagination, identity, and creative capability is essential to building resilience, social cohesion, and sustainable prosperity. It treats artists and cultural institutions not as recipients of public subsidy but as co-creators of public value.
Similarly, in Mexico City, the “Utopías” initiative (short for Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social, “Units of Transformation and Organisation for Inclusion and Social Harmony”) is a powerful example of how the state can invest in beauty at the community level to provide care, rebuild trust, and steer the economy towards creativity and inclusive growth. The Utopías are multifunctional cultural and civic spaces co-designed with residents to transform neglected urban areas into hubs of participation, collective healing, and pride.
By embedding art, green spaces, sports, cultural programmes, and social services into public infrastructure, the state demonstrates that all people, especially the most marginalised, deserve dignity, beauty, and joy. This investment in the aesthetic and social fabric of everyday life fosters self-worth and belonging, leading to greater civic engagement and economic participation.
Historical precedents also remind us of what is possible when governments boldly invest in arts and culture. The German Bauhaus and the US Works Progress Administration of the 20th century both treated culture as a foundation for reimagining society, integrating artistic imagination with social purpose and public investment. They understood that to rebuild economies and democracies, we must also rebuild meaning and connection.
These initiatives, alongside work from across the world, should inspire EU budget and cultural policy to value the market-shaping effects of arts and culture. All efforts should be context-specific, but the overall goal of Europe’s budget and industrial policy should not be to instrumentalise culture for economic growth. Instead, it should direct the economy towards public value through arts and culture. That requires new metrics, new partnerships, and, most of all, a renewed sense of imagination in policymaking.
- Mariana Mazzucato (2025). The Public Value of Arts and Culture, p. 15. ↩︎
