Following current policy attention to well-being and resilience, “care” is increasingly appearing in cultural sector debates, and is likely to gain further traction in cultural policy. What, then, does “care” actually refer to?

For many years now, “care” has been on the lips of cultural and creative practitioners. More recently, care has also entered the vocabulary of cultural intermediaries and policymakers. It increasingly appears alongside other concepts, such as “well-being” and “resilience”- a pairing that is increasingly visible in sectoral debates. Recent conferences such as NEMO’s Who cares? Museums, wellbeing and resilience and the Culture & Care European Conference in Leuven point to how these concepts are being discussed alongside one another.

In European cultural policy, these ideas are being taken up in different ways: resilience is currently being explored through initiatives such as Creative FLIP, while well-being features prominently in newer strategic frameworks like the Culture Compass for Europe. Care is now entering this same space, but without yet having the same shared definitions or reference points.

At the same time, “care” is increasingly used to describe different, partly overlapping debates, including discussions around culture and care in relation to health. While that perspective is important, the focus here is on care as it is practiced and experienced within CCS.

As work continues to define the parameters of these concepts and their relationship to cultural and creative work, it is important that “care” does not turn into an empty buzzword. Rather, it needs to be encountered and understood in the context that has propelled it into wider discussion in the first place: the ethics of care, rooted in feminist theory, later taken up by philosophy and the arts.

Care is not just a value – it’s work

Originating in the feminist movements of the 1980s, American psychologist Carol Gilligan is credited as first developing the ethics of care. In the broadest sense, feminist scholars have put forward that care be viewed as a fundamental human practice. It is the work of maintaining, sustaining, and repairing our world: our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all interwoven in a complex, life-sustaining web.

Building on this work, feminist scholars such as Joan Tronto have argued that care is not a single act but a process shaped by power and responsibility. Care involves noticing needs, responding to them, being attentive to how care is received and, crucially, caring 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 others in ways that align with commitments to justice, equality, and democracy. Importantly, care is a form of work: relational, affective, and unevenly recognised. In this sense, care is never neutral – it is always political, collective, and embedded in the conditions under which this work is carried out.

Care has also become increasingly visible as an artistic concern, informing projects that foreground vulnerability, interdependence, and repair. But beyond representation, the more consequential shift is methodological: how care reshapes the relational conditions of making, researching, and producing art.

What care reveals about cultural work

Research on the cultural and creative sectors has long described artistic labour as profoundly precarious: freelance, competitive, and highly individualised, often sustained through narratives of self-reliance and entrepreneurial independence. This is not just general observation, but a reality reflected in recent EU-level analyses. A 2024 study for the CULT Committee, carried out by IDEA Consult with Imec-SMIT-VUB, Inforelais (Sylvia Amann), Values of Culture & Creativity (Joost Heinsius), and KUL-CiTiP, highlights precarious working conditions as one of the historically grown barriers of the CCS. Working conditions are characterised by atypical working patterns, fragmented employment statuses, and fragile economic circumstances. There is a notably higher share of self-employed cultural workers compared to the broader economy, alongside persistent short-term funding structures that undermine career sustainability. These structural conditions shape not only how creative work is done, but also the labour relations, social protections, and well-being of those who produce cultural value.

It is important to recognise that cultural workers already carry out extensive forms of care. Through their work, they sustain communities, shared spaces, cultural memory, and social dialogue. They care for audiences, peers, collaborators, and local contexts, often providing emotional, relational, and civic labor that exceeds formal job descriptions or contractual obligations. Yet, despite growing recognition of the CCS’s contribution to well-being, innovation, and societal transformation, policy frameworks are yet to systematically engage with the working conditions that underpin this care-intensive work.  In this context, care practices are not an optional add-on, but integral to the everyday labour of creative work and its wider social scope, often compensating for gaps in institutional support, infrastructure, and rights.

These reflections resonate with ongoing IDEA Consult work on such projects as Creative FLIP and Perform Europe, where questions of resilience and working conditions are being explored both explicitly and implicitly. In this sense, care offers a useful lens for connecting ethics, policy, and practice, and for thinking about what sustainable cultural work might look like in the years ahead.

For those working across research, policy, and practice, the growing prominence of care should raise an important question. How can cultural policies, funding structures, and institutions put care into practice, rather than just into words?