The Politics of Développement Culturel

Abstract

The analysis of the policy process developed in previous chapters focused on the relationship between the Ministry of Culture and its ‘clients’ in particular sectors, and emphasized the influence of sectoral interest groups on the Ministry’s policy output. In this chapter, by contrast, we will be considering a sector characterized by the virtual absence of stable funding relationships between government and private sector ‘clients’, and in which policy can, by definition, be driven only by a ‘political’ dynamic. The choice of développement culturel, or cultural development, is not fortuitous. The central theme of this book so far has been the ‘stabilizing’ impact of sectoral policy networks on policy outputs. By contrast, the dominant theme in this chapter will be the extreme vulnerability to a wide range of exogenous influences — many of them contingent and personal — of a policy area marked by the absence of strong, integrated policy networks. The account set out in this chapter will thus, in a sense, act as a controlling case for the sectoral case studies of previous chapters. Instead of looking at individual policies, this chapter will consider the factors that influenced the budgetary and institutional status of développement culturel within the Ministry of Culture between 1981 and 1993.