What Does a Healthy Cultural Ecosystem Actually Look Like?

Among Fellows at the Salzburg Global Culture, Arts and Society session on "Creating Futures: Rethinking Cultural Institutions, Infrastructure, and Investment," a shared vision emerged: A "healthy" cultural ecosystem requires long-term strategies and the capacity to operate beyond any single means of survival, whether that is one institution, one funding cycle, or individual passion substituting for proper systems.

As Pedro Gattoni, Director of Production and Infrastructure at the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra (MGPO), put it simply: 

"A spectacular venue without artists, educators, technicians, and an engaged community is nothing more than an empty building."

A cultural ecosystem is everything that makes the building meaningful: the people, the relationships, and the pathways for access and participation that allow culture to reach beyond its walls. For Deputy Art Curator of World Bank US, Martin Inthamassou, a healthy ecosystem allows young artists to develop, communities to participate, institutions to innovate, and policymakers to understand culture as part of a broader social and economic system. It allows for diversity of all levels: "A healthy cultural ecosystem is diverse, interconnected, and resilient. It allows different forms of culture to coexist: professional and amateur, traditional and experimental, urban and rural, commercial and non-commercial, institutional and community-based. It should create space for relevance, but also for participation. It should support major institutions, but not at the expense of smaller organizations or emerging voices. Cultural ecosystem is balance.’’

Fellows investigated alternative models of leadership, ownership, and decision-making within cultural institutions, and identified governance approaches that are more transparent, participatory, and responsive to evolving societal needs.  

Emil Kang, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Yale University, illustrated what goes wrong when institutions lose sight of community. In Taipei, gigantic performing arts centers were built while established grassroots organizations like Cloud Gate Dance Theater were already there serving communities.

"Sometimes I think institutions are built to satisfy a single person or a single stakeholder's ego rather than come out organically from a community or some kind of movement," Emil remarked.

When institutions are built for vanity rather than community, they get justified through the wrong metrics - visitor numbers, tourism figures, and economic output rather than the cultural and social value they actually produce, echoing Martin's remarks. Beyond individual decisions, he argues governments have consistently prioritized institutions over the ecosystems around them: "not just planting the trees, which I call the institutions, but preparing the soil, which is the infrastructure — they have done much less of that soil preparation. And when the trees die, they don't know why."

The human cost of this is just as systemic. Martin pointed out that many cultural ecosystems exploit the vulnerability of cultural workers, as these systems depend on precarious labor, unpaid passion, and informal networks. While that creates innovation, it also leads to exhaustion and inequality.

“We need to be honest about the fact that the cultural sector often survives because people accept conditions that would be considered unacceptable in other sectors,” Martin stated.  

These structural failures are not evenly distributed globally. Ouafa Belgacem, Founder and CEO of Culture Funding Watch (CFW) in Tunisia, advocates for a resource mobilization strategy specifically focused on the Global South - and for wealthy actors within the Global South to invest in their own cultural sectors. Without this, cultural institutions in the Global South remain dependent on international grants and funding, which often come from one specific region - the Global North. This creates a power imbalance and gaps in what is expected and what is required. “Every funding has its own agenda and the prerogative…it's up to us to decide whether we're going to follow it or not, and if there is a lack of resources in the Global South, the power balance is never equal,” she said.  

The CFW works to shift this through three interlocking pillars: organizing access to funding information in language that creative professionals can actually use; building specialist fundraising capacity so artists aren't burdened with roles outside their expertise; and lobbying donors, investors, and governments to improve the legal and financial frameworks that determine where resources flow.

"We can't talk about cultural policy or developing a supportive creative industry if we don't talk about cultural financing strategy - or who is funding it," Ouafa commented.

Martin and Pedro point to similar issues in the South American Region. Pedro identified the disconnect between artistic excellence and management capacity as the most critical failure in Brazilian cultural infrastructure. Training programs prioritize cultural theory over practical skills in finance, fundraising, and strategic planning. "Passion is essential in our field, but it cannot be the only thing keeping the doors open," he said. Geographic concentration compounds this: resources and decision-making power cluster in capital or wealthy cities, leaving the rest of the country on unstable, project-based financing. “We need cultural leaders who can sit at policy tables and speak across sectors. We need economists, urban planners, climate specialists, educators, and development professionals to understand that culture is not a soft add-on. It is one of the ways societies create meaning, adapt to change, and imagine collective futures,” Martin asserted. 

Emil argues little has changed in how cultural funding is decided. In the U.S., he points to a pattern stretching from Carnegie-era philanthropy to today's sovereign wealth funds, where oligarchic wealth has always decided what culture gets made and what gets left behind. The solution, Emil argues, is not to find a better patron but to build a more diversified base.

He proposes a portfolio of mechanisms: endowments, real estate, financial vehicles, property tax allocation, philanthropy reframed as investment – each revenue stream becomes a hedge against the others. He points to community-based mutual aid models as an underexplored source of this infrastructure. "In Ghana it's called Susu, in Korea it's called Sangeo. Individuals come together and contribute, and when someone needs something, they withdraw from this community asset. It's purely self-owned and self-controlled. I think we need to have more of these models that are more structured and articulated to allow for scale to occur." The “soil” of the ecosystem, as he puts it, is built from many sources, not one.

Pedro Gattoni's experience at the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra offers a working model of what that portfolio can look like in practice. The orchestra operates as an independent nonprofit managing a public good: approximately 70% state-funded, supplemented by corporate sponsorships and earned income, with an endowment now in development. Pedro contrasts this with fully public orchestras, which he describes as rigid, politically dependent, and artistically stagnant, and fully private foundations, which are innovative but volatile. The hybrid captures the strengths of both. "The best of both worlds: a clear public mission driven by private sector efficiency," he says. It is not a perfect solution, but it is a functional one - proof that diversification is possible without abandoning public purpose. 

Oufa, however, is critical of expectations for the cultural sector to become ‘self-reliant’. “That is a narrative that we as creative people are conditioned to think about. Why are we the only sector that everybody labels as [being] heavily dependent on grants and that we [must not be]?’’ She remarked that every industry receives subsidies - including billion-dollar companies. She gave the example of the agriculture sector in Tunisia, which receives huge grants from the government, while the cultural sector receives not even a small fraction of that amount. "We are going to get our share from public subsidies like every other [sector],” she asserted.

A mutual consensus emerged among Fellows: the funding architecture must change to include more mixed models, public, private and community-based financing. Martin put it plainly: “We need long-term trust. Cultural ecosystems cannot be sustained only through one-year grants and emergency funding. They need continuity, institutional capacity, and the possibility to plan.”

The conversations that emerged from this session point toward something larger than any single institution or funding cycle. Across continents and vastly different cultural contexts, Fellows converged on a shared conviction: The cultural sector's most pressing challenge is not a shortage of creativity or vision, but a need to redesign the systems meant to support it.