“Participation”: The new cultural policy and communication agenda

In this opening article we investigate the participatory agenda in Nordic cultural policies from a critical perspective and then introduce the articles that make up this thematic issue. In different ways, all the articles examine the effects of the shift towards participation in national cultural policies and how it is translated at regional, local and institutional policy levels. The articles raise concerns about the relationship between democracy and public culture and how it is influenced by the participatory agenda. What stands out is a perception of the participatory agenda itself as an “entangled” policy composed of different, more or less correlated means within a widened, liberal policy field that accommodates paradoxes and therefore also interventions. The central question in this introduction is how the agenda can be directed towards a “democratizing of democracy” (Agamben et al. 2010) from the perspective of a “radical” democracy as suggested by Chantal Mouffe (2013) and Jacques Rancière (2015 [2010]).