When administration forgets what is at stake

There is a particular kind of professional situation that most people outside the cultural sector rarely see. It begins with an official letter, written in perfectly formal language, requesting something that appears, at first glance, to be merely administrative. You read it once. Then again. You open the financial documentation. You compare the figures. You check the original justification, the subsequent correspondence, the requirements and the supporting evidence. And then you realise that something does not add up. Not metaphorically. Numerically.

Years ago, I was asked to help manage a situation involving a public cultural organisation and an administrative requirement concerning the justification of a previous year’s public funding. The organisation had already completed and submitted its justification for the relevant financial year. The matter appeared to have been closed. Then, unexpectedly, a new requirement arrived demanding the repayment of the entire amount received.

When I first looked at the documentation, I assumed there had to be something I was missing. An error in the accounting. A discrepancy between the expenditure declared and the expenditure accepted. A procedural issue. Something. So I did what one should do when confronted with a complicated administrative problem: I stopped reacting to the tone of the letter and went back to the evidence.

I reconstructed the numbers. I compared what had originally been requested with what had actually been justified. I went through the supporting documentation again. I checked the figures against the requirements. I reconstructed the logic of the file from the beginning and built a point-by-point response, supported by the documentary evidence necessary to substantiate every relevant statement.

What initially looked like an overwhelming institutional problem gradually became something much more precise: a question that could be answered by reading the documentation carefully.

This is perhaps one of the least glamorous aspects of cultural management. Behind the concerts, exhibitions, performances, residencies and artistic projects lies an enormous amount of administrative work. Publicly funded culture exists within systems of accountability for good reason. Public money must be justified. Organisations must be able to demonstrate what they have done with it. Procedures matter. Documentation matters. Deadlines matter.

But there is another principle that should matter just as much: proportionality.

A cultural organisation is not an abstract administrative unit. It is made up of people. A demand for the repayment of an entire year’s public funding can have consequences that extend far beyond a line in an accounting document. For a small or medium-sized non-profit organisation, such a demand can potentially affect salaries, future programming, contractual commitments, relationships with artists and suppliers, and ultimately the organisation’s ability to continue operating.

This is why administrative decisions affecting cultural organisations cannot be treated as purely mechanical exercises. Behind every number there may be a real organisation. Behind every organisation there may be dozens of people. And behind those people there may be years of cultural work that cannot simply be switched off because an administrative interpretation has changed.

The episode also reminded me of something uncomfortable about institutions: the authority of a document can sometimes conceal the fragility of the reasoning behind it.

An official letter carries institutional weight. Its language is formal. Its sender represents an administration. Its recipient may understandably assume that an extensive process of verification has taken place before such a serious demand is made.

But authority does not eliminate the need for verification. Quite the opposite. The greater the potential consequences of an administrative decision, the greater the responsibility to make sure that the underlying facts have actually been examined.

This is particularly important when numbers are involved. Financial justification is not a literary genre. Figures do not become correct because they appear in an official document, nor incorrect because they are presented by a small cultural organisation. They need to be read, compared and understood.

There was another detail in this particular case that made the situation even more revealing. When I eventually picked up the phone to understand what had happened, I discovered that the official responsible for the requirement had only recently taken up the position and had not yet even been provided with a corporate telephone. That fact, in itself, is not evidence of wrongdoing. Everyone has to begin somewhere, and new professionals inevitably inherit complex files. But it did raise a more fundamental question: what mechanisms of review and supervision exist when a newly appointed person is entrusted with decisions capable of placing an entire organisation in an existentially difficult position?

The issue, therefore, is not the individual. Nor is it about whether someone is new to a position. Institutions depend on people learning their responsibilities. The issue is whether the institutional process surrounding consequential decisions is sufficiently robust to ensure that the relevant documentation has been properly understood before a demand of such magnitude is issued.

In my case, the appropriate response was not an emotional complaint but an evidentiary one.

So I wrote. Not one paragraph. Not an indignant email. A structured response, supported point by point by documentation, calculations and evidence. I assembled the relevant material into a coherent file so that anyone reviewing the case could follow the reasoning without having to take my word for anything.

This distinction matters enormously. When dealing with institutions, there is a temptation to respond to institutional pressure with an equal amount of emotional pressure. To become angry. To accuse. To threaten. To write the email that expresses exactly how absurd the situation feels.

But evidence is usually more powerful.

A good administrative response should make it possible for someone who was not involved in the original decision to reconstruct the situation and see what happened. It should reduce ambiguity rather than increase it. It should make the relevant facts visible. And, when necessary, it should create a formal record.

That was ultimately what I did: I responded directly, provided the relevant allegations and supporting evidence, ensured that the material reached the appropriate supervisory level, and formally registered the response so that there would be an unequivocal record of the organisation’s position.

What struck me most afterwards was not the amount of work involved. It was the asymmetry of the situation. An administration can send a letter in an afternoon. A small cultural organisation may need days, sometimes weeks, to understand what that letter means, reconstruct its accounts, consult professionals, gather documents and prepare a response.

The cost of an administrative error is therefore not distributed equally.

For the institution, an incorrect requirement may mean a correction, a revised interpretation or an internal conversation. For the organisation receiving it, it may mean panic, unpaid work, professional fees, disrupted programming and existential uncertainty.

That asymmetry deserves greater attention.

There is also a question of institutional learning here. Public administrations, like cultural organisations, are made up of people. People change positions. Responsibilities move from one person to another. New professionals arrive and inherit files that they did not create. They have to understand procedures, documentation and organisational histories that may be complex.

That is normal.

What should not be normal is for the complexity of the institution to become the burden of the organisation on the receiving end. New responsibilities require supervision. Significant decisions require review. The more consequential the request, the more important it becomes to ensure that the relevant information has actually been understood before institutional authority is brought to bear. This is not an argument against public oversight. It is an argument for better public oversight.

Cultural organisations receiving public funding should be accountable. They should justify what they do. They should be prepared to explain their decisions and demonstrate that public resources have been used appropriately.

But accountability has to operate in both directions.

The organisation must be accountable for the money it receives. The institution must be accountable for the decisions it makes about that organisation.

Perhaps this is something we do not discuss enough when we talk about cultural policy. We tend to think about public funding primarily in terms of amounts, eligibility, calls, grants and evaluation criteria. We discuss how much money culture receives and which projects are supported.

We talk much less about what happens afterwards.

We should.

Because the relationship between a cultural organisation and a public institution does not end when funding is awarded. It continues through justification, evaluation, monitoring and administrative communication. And the quality of that relationship can determine whether public funding functions as genuine support for cultural activity or becomes an additional layer of instability for organisations already operating with limited resources.

What this particular episode reaffirmed was not that institutions are incapable of making mistakes. They are. I knew. I know. Rather, it confirmed something I have long advocated: that professional cultural management increasingly requires an understanding not only of artistic processes, but also of administrative systems, financial structures, procedural rights and documentary evidence.

Sometimes the job is to negotiate. Sometimes it is to interpret. Sometimes it is to calculate. Sometimes it is to write. And sometimes it is simply to notice that the numbers do not make sense and have the patience to prove it. That work rarely makes it into the public narrative of culture. It should.

Because protecting artistic projects does not only mean protecting artists from artistic or contractual problems. It can also mean protecting the organisational structures that make artistic work possible in the first place. A theatre company, a festival, an association, an ensemble or a cultural foundation may look from the outside like an institution. From the inside, it is usually something much more fragile: a network of people, commitments, resources and trust, held together by an extraordinary amount of invisible work.

When an administrative decision places that structure at risk, precision is not bureaucracy.

Precision is protection.