A flagship cultural funding programme rarely pauses to question itself, but that is precisely what unfolded this month as the people who run Europe’s creative-sector grants gathered to ask an uncomfortable question: does the current design of Creative Europe still match what artists and cultural organisations actually need?
The occasion was a series of meetings in the EU capital. On 10 and 11 June, more than 100 beneficiaries of Cooperation Projects selected in 2025 met for the annual grant-holders gathering. The following day, over 70 representatives of cultural networks, platforms for emerging artists, orchestras and sectoral actions, including the European Heritage Label and the European Heritage Hub, sat down with the executive agency and the Commission’s education and culture directorate. In total more than 170 beneficiaries took part, a cross-section of the ecosystem the programme exists to sustain.
The 12 June session was deliberately structured around two themes rather than a celebration of past grants. The first was a forward-looking reflection on whether the programme’s architecture still fits the sectors it serves. The second took the form of working groups on the two issues that dominate cultural-policy conversations across the continent: the precarious working conditions of artists, and the sector’s chronic difficulty accessing finance. Both are long-standing complaints, and both expose the limits of a grants programme that can fund projects but cannot, by itself, fix a labour market or a credit gap.
Creative Europe runs on a budget of around 380 million euros for the year, a sum that sounds substantial until it is spread across film, music, heritage, publishing, performing arts and cross-border cooperation in dozens of countries. For 2026 the programme has opted for continuity over reinvention, keeping its established actions while layering in newer initiatives: a third edition of Perform Europe to support cross-border touring, the continued rollout of the European Heritage Label through 2029, and a fresh action modelled on the European Spaces of Culture concept.
Why does any of this matter beyond the sector itself? Because culture is increasingly framed in the Union as both an economic engine and a strategic asset. The cultural and creative industries employ millions and feed a tourism economy that few member states can do without, while heritage and artistic exchange are pitched as soft-power counterweights in a fractious geopolitical moment. A new EU culture strategy, recently unpacked by sector advocates, leans into that competitiveness argument, presenting support for the arts as industrial policy as much as patronage.
The self-examination is not merely procedural. The current programming period is winding toward its end, and decisions about the next multiannual cycle are already being shaped, including a parliamentary committee’s draft thinking on the post-2027 framework. By asking whether its design still fits now, the programme is effectively writing the case for what should change later, when budgets are fixed for years at a stretch.
Critics of EU cultural funding make a familiar argument: that the application process is byzantine, that smaller organisations without grant-writing capacity are squeezed out, and that headline budgets shrink in real terms against inflation. Defenders reply that Creative Europe remains one of the few instruments capable of funding genuinely cross-border work that no single national ministry would underwrite, and that its convening power, on display this month, is itself a form of support.
Whether the reflection produces real change will not be clear until the next budget cycle takes shape. For now, the programme has done something modestly unusual for a public institution: it has invited the people it funds to tell it what is not working.
