La política cultural en el País Vasco: del gobierno de la cultura a la gobernanza cultural

Abstract

The article tries to defend the hypothesis that Basque cultural policy is characterized by the lack of centrality of culture. The cultural policy is so to speak more political than cultural. This means that culture occupies a precarious position from the institutional perspective and an erratic one from the strategic point of view. Broadly speaking, cultural policy in the Basque Country can be defined as an unfinished evolution from one period of “government of culture” in which culture lacks any central role due to the perverse combination of two factors, i.e. the sublimation of culture and its political manipulation, to a second period of “cultural governance”, still in its shaping process, in which cultural policy opens up to the diversity of the different cultural sectors and the civil society by developing systematic diagnosis and mobilizing co-decision schemes.