Since 2018, the Boekman Foundation in the Netherlands acts as the Compendium’s Service Provider and is responsible for the daily management of the project. Together with its team consisting of a project manager and a content and communication coordinator, the Boekman Foundation implemented a number of crucial developments, such as the redeveloped culturalpolicies.net, that maintain the Compendium’s longstanding network and reputation.
As an international organisation with stakeholders throughout Europe, it has been the Compendium’s vision to rotate the role of Service Provider every few years. Therefore, after a successful three-year run, the Boekman Foundation will handover its role of Service Provider to the Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft e.V. (KuPoGe) in Germany. At KuPoGe, Ulrike Blumenreich and Oliver Göbel will coordinate and manage the international monitoring project from 1 January 2021 onwards. In addition to taking care of the Compendium’s cultural policy information, KuPoGe will focus on scientific research, online overviews and the establishment of new features such as digital sessions on cultural policy.
Background
The Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends was established in the 1990s by the Council of Europe in cooperation with ERICarts. Since then, it has evolved into a multi-stakeholder association that comprises research institutions, national ministries of culture and other European associations. The countries represented include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland.
With the financial support of its members, the Compendium maintains a web-based and permanently updated information and monitoring system of national cultural policies and related development. At the heart of the platform culturalpolicies.net lies the Compendium database, which encompasses cultural policy country profiles. These comparable profiles are drawn up and updated by independent cultural policy experts. The Compendium’s experts and their collective knowledge are therefore crucial for the existence of this unique information platform.
The Compendium also translates the country profiles into comparative tables that indicate trends and in turn inform European cultural policy. It anticipates and acts upon current cultural developments (COVID-19 being a recent example) and places them into social and political context relevant for researchers and policy makers alike.
For more information or questions about the Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in general or the Service Provider transition in specific, please contact office@culturalpolicies.net.