2024

Renko, Vappu

Regions are faced with manifold and contradictory expectations in Finnish cultural policy. On one hand, national cultural policy aims to enable equal opportunities for artistic work and cultural participation across the country. On the other hand, the regions are expected to build on distinct regional cultural traits to promote culture as part of regional development. This dissertation examines how regions are able to address the manifold expectations by constructing regional cultural policy. The study focuses on the statutory regional cultural administration, which currently includes four organisations: 1) the regional councils, 2) the Regional State Administrative Agencies, 3) the Centres for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment and 4) the Arts Promotion Centre Finland’s regional offices and arts councils. All organisations participate in constructing regional cultural policy, which is here understood as a line of activities related to culture at the regional level. The organisations have different tasks and geographical areas of operation. The possibilities of regional cultural policy construction in this multi-actor and multi-border context are here contrasted to Sweden, where self-governing regions hold the main responsibility for regional cultural policy. The study asks: How has Finnish regional cultural administration been constructed since the 1960s and positioned in relation to the local and national levels? What regional cultural policy practices are currently implemented in Finnish regional cultural administration and how? How is the construction of regional cultural policy made possible within the current Finnish regional cultural administration in contrast to Sweden? The study builds on qualitative and quantitative datasets analysed by mixed methods in three research articles included in the study. The theoretical framework derives from theories of state rescaling and a governance framework used in the study of policy processes. The study shows that, unlike in Sweden, in Finland cultural policy authority has mainly been redistributed within state regional administration. In the Finnish regional cultural policy model the object of regional decentralisation has mainly been administrative, whereas in Sweden, political and fiscal decentralisation have also been applied. Currently, the Finnish regional organisations’ possibilities to construct regional cultural policy are complicated by blurred administrative borders, dispersed national direction and the lack of coordination and collaborative structures. Clarifying the regional cultural administration’s operational areas and responsibilities as well as establishing a structure for collaborating with arts and cultural actors in the region would enhance the regional level’s legitimacy in cultural policymaking.