09/07/2026
After more than two years of research, data collection, PDF extractions, language barriers, country-by-country checks, methodological doubts, interviews, partner conversations and attempts to find data that was often scattered, partial or simply not there, here we are: Performing Arts Public Funding in European Rural Areas is finally out.
As part of the Creative Europe-funded SPARSE Plus project, Chloe Sustainability has researched and drafted this pilot report on how national public funding for performing arts reaches rural and non-urban territories across Europe.
The work came with a rather ambitious challenge: finding a way to read very different national funding systems together, without flattening the specificities, gaps and contradictions of each context.
The report scratches the surface of a much deeper issue. How performing arts, and culture more broadly, are funded, supported and made possible in Europe’s rural areas?
The numbers already point to an evident imbalance: around 8% of recorded national public funding reaches rural areas, where 19% of Europe’s population lives.
But the research is also an attempt to look at what sits behind that gap: the different structures, support architectures and funding conditions that shape cultural access across European rural territories.
Some of the questions the report tries to unpack:
How are funding systems designed in rural contexts?
Which costs do they recognise?
What do they record, and what remains invisible?
What support structures exist across different national contexts?
And what would it take to make rural cultural access desirable, measurable and workable?
Full report via link in bio.
© Stefano Baioni, Magnitudini by Michela Paoloni
Design: Elena Colombini
