Why Care, and Why Now?

Care has not entered cultural discourse by accident. Its growing visibility reflects a period in which social fragmentation, political instability, ecological crisis and the precarious conditions of cultural work have become increasingly difficult to ignore. The pandemic did not create these conditions, but it exposed them with unusual clarity. Artists, freelancers, producers and festival workers were among those whose livelihoods and professional identities became suddenly vulnerable. What had often been treated as a normal feature of cultural work appeared more clearly as a structural condition. 

The crisis also revealed an imbalance in collective priorities. Societies possessed extensive systems for competition, security and emergency control, but the institutions and resources required to sustain health, solidarity, cultural life and collective wellbeing often proved fragile. For the cultural sector, the question was not only how to survive an interruption. It was what kind of world cultural work should help make possible, and what conditions would allow the people creating shared meaning to remain part of that world. 

Across many parts of the world, political and economic priorities increasingly place financial interest, competition and strategic advantage before human and ecological wellbeing. Power is too often exercised as domination rather than as the capacity to create the conditions for meaningful coexistence. Human rights, cultural freedom, social justice and the urgent repair of damaged living systems compete for attention with demands for growth, security and control—and are frequently pushed further down the political agenda. 

In such a period, festivals can acquire a significance that exceeds the programmes they present. At their best, they create temporary spaces in which another way of living together becomes imaginable and able to be experienced. People gather across differences, direct attention towards something they value, contribute to a shared event, encounter unfamiliar perspectives and experience forms of collective life that ordinary social structures do not always make possible. In this limited sense, festivals can offer a form of lived utopia: not a perfect society or an escape from reality, but a temporary rehearsal of relationships, values and possibilities that do not yet sufficiently shape the wider world. 

Festivals are not automatically caring or emancipatory. They can reproduce the same inequalities, exclusions, extractive practices and concentrations of power that characterise the societies around them. Their utopian potential depends upon how they are organised: whose voices shape the programme, whose labour carries it, who is able to participate, how authority is exercised, which costs are made invisible and how the human and ecological consequences of the event are addressed. 

This is why care matters now. To include care as a value is to ask whether the temporary world created by a festival—and the more persistent ecosystem that sustains it—embodies the kind of culture the festival hopes to contribute to society. Care makes the festival’s public purpose inseparable from its methods. It asks cultural organisations not only to represent dignity, justice, connection and ecological responsibility through their content, but to practise these values through their relationships, decisions, working conditions and use of resources. 

A festival can therefore become more than a reflection of the world as it is. It can become a place where elements of a more caring culture are experienced, tested, revised and carried into wider social life. Repeated across time and connected through local, regional and international networks, such practices can influence organisational cultures, public expectations and cultural policy. The festival’s contribution to wellbeing lies not only in the moments of joy, meaning or connection it offers, but in the forms of living together that it helps society learn. 

Some cultural organisations moved beyond temporary emergency measures and began to examine how care might shape governance, programming, working conditions and community relationships. Practices that had previously existed in isolation acquired a shared language. Care gradually emerged not as another programme strand, but as a horizontal principle: a way of asking how cultural purpose is pursued, how power is exercised and what conditions cultural work creates for those involved. 

The European Festivals Association’s engagement with care, arts, wellbeing and mental health belongs to a wider field of work concerned with the conditions under which festivals, cultural workers, communities and their environments can flourish. The activities connected with this field do not all have the same institutional status. Some are initiated or coordinated directly by EFA; some are developed collaboratively with member festivals, invited experts or partner organisations; and others are European projects in which EFA participates as a consortium partner. Taken together, they constitute a developing ecosystem of inquiry, peer learning, experimentation and advocacy rather than a single EFA programme or the work of one working group. 

EFA’s engagement with care has developed from the inside out, beginning in 2022 with biennial wellbeing workshops for its own team and gradually expanding towards peer learning, projects and advocacy within the wider festival community. Within the spaces EFA convenes for its festival community, “The Time We Spend Together”  began with a retreat hosted by Varna Summer International Music Festival in 2023 and has continued as a collaborative space for reflection on care, wellbeing and community. The “Share Care” workshop at the 2024 Arts Festivals Summit in Usedom, conceptualised and facilitated by Rarița Zbranca and Mahir Namur, focused on the systemic conditions of cultural labour. At the 2025 Arts Festivals Summit in Edinburgh, the “Festivals Care! Arts and Health” workshop, facilitated by Rarița Zbranca of the Cultural Centre Cluj with a contribution from Katey Warran, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh, examined the contribution of the arts to health and their impact on societal wellbeing within the framework of the Creative Europe-supported CARE — Culture for Mental Health project. EFA has also represented or carried these concerns into wider policy conversations, including the Mental Health Summit at the European Parliament. These activities are better understood as convening, peer learning and advocacy than as stand-alone projects owned solely by EFA. 

A different category is formed by partnership projects. EFA is a partner in CARE — Culture for Mental Health, a Creative Europe-supported project coordinated by the Cluj Cultural Centre. Running from 2024 to 2027, CARE explores how engagement with arts and culture can support mental health and wellbeing among young people, working adults and people with disabilities. Within this partnership context, the Festivals Care! Working Group coordinated by EFA is contributing to the EFFE Seal Catalogue #2 on Arts, Health and Well-being. EFA’s own and closely associated initiatives connect care with other parts of festival practice in different ways. The European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists (EFFEA), an initiative of EFA, has produced a series of Duty of Care Protocols drawing on the residency experiences, reports and reflections of participating festivals and artists. Taken together, the protocols address issues including working conditions, power relations between artists and programmers, fair remuneration, inclusivity, wellbeing, sustainable touring and environmental responsibility. EFA’s “Count Me In” campaign and report done in 2024 with the insight and support of Ceyda Berk-Söderblom – Arts manager, curator, and festival programmer specialising in social inclusion, diversity, and inclusion management – invited festivals to examine how diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility and belonging are addressed across decision-making, team structures, artistic programming, communication and outreach. Distinguishing these roles makes the wider picture clearer: EFA sometimes initiates, sometimes convenes or coordinates, and sometimes contributes as a partner to work led collectively with others. 

EFA’s work on environmental sustainability forms another essential part of this wider ecosystem. Through its “Up to Green” initiative, EFA offers learning and exchange on sustainable practices within the festival sector in relation to wider European and international climate initiatives. This work has included the “Go Green, Festivals” campaign; annual sustainability workshops within the Arts Festivals Summit; the European Festivals Forest; collaboration with Pearle* on practical guidance concerning the European Green Deal and Live Performance Organisations; partnership with the EU Climate Pact; partnership with the New European Bauhaus; and its role as a co-initiator of Perform Europe, which supports fairer, greener and more inclusive models of cross-border touring. These initiatives approach environmental responsibility through policy, knowledge-sharing, practical experimentation and changes in festival practice rather than treating it as a separate technical concern. 

Bringing this environmental work into the present Reader helps clarify the breadth of care. Care concerns the wellbeing of people and the quality of their relationships, but it also concerns the places, resources and living systems upon which those relationships depend. Social, organisational and ecological sustainability are not identical; nevertheless, they meet in a shared question: what and who  
is being depleted in order for cultural activity to continue? From this perspective, environmentally responsible practice is not an external obligation added to festival management. It is one dimension  
of taking responsibility for the complete ecosystem through which a festival becomes possible. 

The EFFE Seal for Festival Cities and Regions initiative offers a particularly important bridge between festival practice, environmental sustainability and territorial policy. The “EFFE Seal Catalogue #1 on Environmental Sustainability” brings together practices, experiences and challenges reported by participating festivals, cities and regions during the 2023–2024 festival season. It organises them across six areas: policy, programming, operations, communications, experiments and innovative solutions, and challenges. The catalogue does not propose a universal model; it emphasises that its examples need to be understood within the geographical, social and economic contexts of the contributing cities and regions. It nevertheless makes different practices visible and creates a basis for exchange. It also demonstrates that environmental transformation cannot be carried by festivals alone. It requires relationships through which cultural actors and public authorities can connect festival knowledge with territorial responsibilities, resources, infrastructure and policy. This is especially relevant to EUFEAST, whose partnership structure brings cities and regions into direct cooperation with festivals and cultural stakeholders. 

The EFFE Seal publication “Festivals in Context: The Role of the Arts in Local Cultural Policy”, written by Elena Polivtseva, develops this festival–territory relationship further. Drawing on policy analysis, research and insights from sixteen local and regional cultural-policy contexts, it examines how cities and regions understand, support and value festivals. The publication situates festivals within pressures that include political instability, social polarisation, economic austerity and environmental urgency. It notes that culture is often recognised for its contributions to economic growth, wellbeing and social inclusion, and that festivals are asked to address local priorities ranging from sustainability and inclusion to tourism and city branding. At the same time, it warns against reducing culture to an instrument serving objectives defined entirely by other policy fields and stresses the intrinsic value, freedom and integrity of artistic work. The task is therefore not simply to ask how festivals can deliver public-policy outcomes, but to create relationships in which festivals and public authorities can learn from one another and develop their territories without subordinating artistic practice to a purely instrumental logic. 

These examples are directly relevant to the approach of this Reader. Festivals do not operate as isolated events. They exist within relationships involving artists, workers, audiences, communities, funders, public authorities, regional partners, international networks, places and living systems. Cities and regions do more than provide resources or permissions: their decisions help shape the conditions under which these relationships develop. Festivals, in turn, generate situated knowledge about participation, cultural meaning, community life and the environmental consequences of cultural production. A caring ecosystem requires this knowledge and power to circulate in both directions. 

As a network, EFA’s distinctive contribution lies in enabling such circulation, connection and advocacy.  
It can help practices and knowledge developed through care, wellbeing and environmental initiatives travel across its festival network, enter dialogue with cultural, health, education, social, ecological and policy networks, and become visible at European level. This movement is reciprocal: experiences from festivals, cities, regions and partnership projects can be translated into shared language, learning resources and policy arguments, while European debates, partnerships and opportunities can be carried back into the festival field. Through advocacy towards EU institutions and other decision-making arenas, EFA can help establish care, wellbeing and environmental responsibility not as marginal or temporary concerns, but as interconnected dimensions of cultural practice, capacity building and policy development. 

Care can be understood as a living culture in another sense. Like a starter culture, an idea may begin  
in small spaces of experimentation. It develops through practice, adaptation and transmission. When people recognise a practice, give it language and share it, the practice can begin to alter a wider environment from within. Yet organisational culture does not spread automatically. It requires time, resources, reinforcement, accountability and a willingness to examine practices that contradict stated values. 

When care is embedded in repeated festival practice, it can travel through the festival’s wider relationships. A way of listening or sharing responsibility developed within a team may influence a partner organisation. An environmental experiment conducted by a festival may inform municipal infrastructure or regional policy. Shared experience may enter a professional network; recurring evidence may shape advocacy; and collective advocacy may contribute to regional, national or European cultural policy. Policy can, in turn, create stronger relational, organisational and ecological conditions for festivals. Care thus moves across scales through reciprocal circulation rather than through a simple one-way progression.

FROM PROGRAMME TO CULTURE 
Care becomes culture when it repeatedly shapes governance, programming, working conditions, public practice and community relationships across time.