Culture and Competitiveness: Where do the Creative Industries fit in the EU’s next budget?

Written By Isabel Gondel

The European Competitiveness Fund will reorganise hundreds of billions of euros in EU funding. Yet cultural and creative industries have only a marginal place in its proposed architecture.

When the European Union talks about competitiveness, culture is rarely the first sector that comes to mind. The vocabulary is familiar: strategic technologies, industrial capacity, digitalisation, innovation, investment and global markets. But Europe's cultural and creative industries are businesses too. They include publishers, designers, music companies, audiovisual producers, games companies, creative technology firms, independent venues, cultural entrepreneurs and many other small and medium-sized enterprises. The question is therefore not whether culture has an economic dimension. It clearly does. The question is whether the EU's next competitiveness architecture will recognise it.

A €234.3 billion fund

For 2028–2034, the European Commission has proposed a new European Competitiveness Fund (ECF) with an indicative envelope of approximately €234.3 billion. The fund would bring together activities currently spread across a number of different programmes and instruments, including areas currently covered by Digital Europe, the Single Market Programme and InvestEU.

The proposed fund is organised around four main policy windows:

  1. Clean Transition and Industrial Decarbonisation;

  2. Health, Biotechnology, Agriculture and Bioeconomy;

  3. Digital Leadership;

  4. Resilience, Security, Defence Industry and Space.

The Commission's broader budget proposal presents the fund as a central instrument for strengthening European competitiveness, simplifying access to funding and mobilising public and private investment. This is potentially a major change in the way European economic and innovation funding is organised.

And where is culture?

This is where the problem begins. In the Commission's proposed legal architecture, cultural and creative industries receive very limited explicit recognition. They appear in relation to the Digital Leadership window, where support for cultural and creative industries is linked to the complementary role of AgoraEU. That might sound sufficient. But legal references matter. They determine which sectors are clearly within the scope of a programme, how funding priorities can subsequently be interpreted, and whether specific instruments can be designed around particular needs. The concern is therefore not simply that the word “culture” appears too few times. It is that creative industries risk having no clear structural home within a fund specifically designed to support competitiveness, innovation and business development.

Dedicated financial tools matter

Creative businesses often face particular difficulties when accessing finance. Many have intangible assets rather than conventional collateral. Their revenues can be project-based. Their markets may be fragmented across countries. And financial institutions may perceive them as higher-risk than businesses operating in more conventional sectors. For this reason, the EU has previously created dedicated mechanisms to improve access to finance.

One important example was the Cultural and Creative Sectors Guarantee Facility, launched under Creative Europe. The mechanism provided guarantees that reduced the risk for banks lending to creative enterprises. Its results were significant. With €180 million in EU guarantees, the facility had helped mobilise more than €1.8 billion in loans by 2020, considerably exceeding its original target, and was estimated to have supported around 59,500 jobs. The instrument was subsequently integrated into InvestEU.

However, which is the problem with the new architecture?

Under the proposed 2028–2034 budget, InvestEU would sit within the European Competitiveness Fund. The concern is that its future application to cultural and creative enterprises becomes less explicit. If a sector is not clearly recognised within the fund's priorities, it may become dependent on other programmes, including AgoraEU, to finance the guarantees or other financial instruments it needs. And this raises an awkward question: if AgoraEU is primarily designed around cultural cooperation, exchange, participation and artistic and media objectives, should it also have to carry the financial instruments needed by creative businesses? Because these are not necessarily the same policy function. A cultural organisation applying for a cooperation grant and a creative SME seeking a loan to scale its business may both belong to the cultural ecosystem, but their financing needs are fundamentally different.

Culture as economic category

There is also a deeper policy question here. There is a danger in arguing for cultural funding exclusively through economic impact. Culture is not valuable only because it creates jobs or contributes to GDP. Cultural activity also has artistic, social, educational and democratic value. A bookstore, a theatre or a music venue should not have to demonstrate a particular return on investment in order to justify its cultural importance.

At the same time, refusing to acknowledge the economic dimension of cultural activity creates another problem. Creative entrepreneurs operate in real markets. They need access to finance. They develop products and services. They employ people. They export. They innovate. And they increasingly operate within highly digitalised global markets. A sensible European cultural policy therefore needs to be able to hold both ideas at once: culture is a public good, and cultural and creative industries are also part of Europe's economy.

And digitalisation makes the issue even clearer

The digital transition illustrates why this matters. Cultural and creative businesses are among the sectors most affected by developments in artificial intelligence, platforms, data, digital distribution and changing consumer behaviour. Cultural heritage is also undergoing large-scale digital transformation. These developments require investment, skills, technological capacity and access to markets. The European Competitiveness Fund is explicitly designed to support digital leadership. So the question is not whether creative industries belong in a digital competitiveness agenda. It is how explicitly they are included and whether their specific needs are recognised.

And this is connected to Horizon Europe!

The issue also connects to the debate over Horizon Europe. The proposed Horizon Europe architecture gives culture less structural visibility than today's dedicated Cluster 2. At the same time, the proposed European Competitiveness Fund gives cultural and creative industries limited explicit space. Meanwhile, AgoraEU is expected to provide the main dedicated European programme for culture. Taken together, these developments suggest a potential division: culture inside AgoraEU, research elsewhere, business elsewhere, but with uncertain connections between them.

That division may be problematic because real cultural ecosystems do not operate in such neat categories. A creative company may simultaneously be a cultural organisation, an SME, a research partner and a technology user. A performing arts organisation may be involved in artistic research, digital innovation and international cooperation. A heritage institution may require cultural funding, digital infrastructure and regional development support. The challenge for the next EU budget is therefore not simply to create a cultural programme. It is to ensure that culture can also participate in the wider European policy frameworks that shape innovation, investment and economic development.

Could something change?

The proposed architecture can still be modified during the legislative process. A stronger role for creative industries within the European Competitiveness Fund could include explicit objectives related to:

  • ethical and human-centred digital technologies;

  • cultural heritage data infrastructure;

  • digitisation and digitalisation;

  • innovative business models;

  • access to international markets;

  • finance and business support for creative SMEs.

These are not necessarily arguments for creating a separate “culture fund” inside the Competitiveness Fund. They are arguments for recognising the creative industries as one of the sectors that European competitiveness policy needs to understand properly.

So which is the bigger question?

The most interesting question may ultimately be less about the amount of money allocated to culture than about where culture is allowed to sit within the EU's policy architecture. If culture is confined to dedicated cultural programmes, it may retain visibility but lose access to major instruments for innovation, investment and digitalisation. If it is treated only as an economic sector, its artistic and public value risks being overlooked. The challenge is to avoid both extremes.

The European cultural ecosystem needs dedicated cultural support. But it also needs access to the broader European infrastructure for research, innovation, digital transformation and finance. The negotiations over the 2028–2034 budget will therefore tell us something important about how the EU understands culture itself. Not simply as something Europe funds. But as something that participates in Europe's economic, technological and social future.

Updated September 2026. The European Competitiveness Fund and the wider 2028–2034 EU budget are still under negotiation.

Sources & further reading


Isabel Gondel

Artist and Strategic Consultant

https://www.isabelgondel.com
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