Trends in cultural policy and culture management in Poland (1989−2014)

Setting aside the fact that lack of policy is also a policy, while analyzing the events of the last 25 years in cultural policy, from the perspective of the year 2014, I wonder whether we can really say that there is no cultural policy in Poland? The author describes and analysis the changes in the sphere of culture management and the cultural policy in Poland during the last quarter of the century. The responsibility for cultural policy rests not only with the central authorities, Ministry of Culture but also local governments, which are more including into the decision-making process the citizens. Citizens are becoming more aware of their rights. Apart from cultural institutions, nongovernmental organizations are more and more often the contractors of public tasks. They co-create and enrich the cultural offer of cities and regions signifi cantly. Not only the number of non-governmental organizations is increasing but also their creativity and the level of the professionalization of their actions. The cultural activity is more and more often undertaken by private economic operators (not only art galleries, but also artistic agencies and impresarios). They cannot count on subsidies from local governments’ budget any more, but they can become contractors of the services at their request under the Public Procurement Law, what, thanks to the last amendment (raising the threshold for public procurement to more than 30 000 Euro) will become a bit easier from the procedural point of view. The role of public cultural institutions is changing. Many of them redefi ned their mission and have been successively building new relations with the audience, taking into consideration the changing needs of the consumers, new economic conditions. Despite the underdeveloped sponsoring in Poland, many of them use the conceptions of CSR and CCR, others diversify their offer, both in terms of the merits and the price, often introducing commercial offer as a complementary one. The new infrastructure in Poland, in case of many cultural institutions, contributed to a substantial change and to the improvement of their conditions. After many years of total investment stagnation in this sphere, together with Poland’s accession into the EU, the Polish state and local governments started to undertake the tasks in this area more bravely. New infrastructure naturally generates the need of innovation. Cultural institutions more willingly and effectively make use of new media today (communication with the audience, mailing, FB, promotion, marketing, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing). They more often see the importance of spending money on marketing activities, which they used to economize on, in case of a shortfall of funds for substantive activities.