Introduction
Contemporary cultural economics has become an increasingly important field for understanding how societies create, support, evaluate, and govern cultural value. Culture is no longer treated merely as a symbolic or aesthetic domain separated from economic and political life. Rather, it is now widely recognized as a strategic field in which public value, social cohesion, identity formation, creative production, regional development, and democratic participation intersect. Museums, heritage sites, festivals, creative industries, cultural entrepreneurship, digital platforms, and public arts institutions all operate within complex systems shaped by markets, public policy, technological change, and changing social expectations.
This edited book, Governance, Policy, and Public Value of Contemporary Cultural Economics, aims to examine the evolving relationship between cultural economics, public governance, and policy design. The central premise of the volume is that culture generates multiple forms of value that cannot be adequately captured through market prices alone. Cultural goods and services often produce public, collective, symbolic, educational, and intergenerational benefits. For this reason, cultural economics requires a broader analytical framework that considers not only production, consumption, and financing, but also governance structures, institutional responsibilities, public funding mechanisms, social inclusion, sustainability, and cultural rights.
In recent decades, cultural sectors have faced significant transformations. Globalization, digitalization, platform economies, urban regeneration strategies, climate change, migration, crises affecting cultural heritage, and changing models of public finance have altered the conditions under which cultural value is produced and distributed. At the same time, governments and public institutions are increasingly expected to justify cultural policies in terms of measurable impact, economic contribution, social benefit, and democratic legitimacy. These developments raise important questions: How should cultural value be defined and assessed? What is the role of the state in supporting cultural production? How can cultural policies balance economic efficiency with equity, accessibility, and sustainability? What governance models are most suitable for complex cultural ecosystems? How can public value be protected in an era of commercialization, austerity, and digital transformation?
The book seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural economics, public policy, public finance, governance studies, cultural policy, urban studies, heritage studies, sociology, and management. It welcomes contributions that examine both theoretical debates and empirical cases. Particular attention is given to the ways in which cultural policies are designed, implemented, financed, evaluated, and contested across different institutional and national contexts. By focusing on governance and public value, the volume aims to move beyond narrow economic interpretations of culture and to contribute to a richer understanding of culture as a public good, a policy field, and a site of collective meaning-making.
This book will therefore provide a critical and contemporary platform for scholars, researchers, policymakers, cultural managers, and practitioners interested in the changing role of culture in economic and public life. It aims to support new discussions on how cultural economics can respond to the challenges of uncertainty, inequality, sustainability, technological change, and institutional complexity. In doing so, the volume seeks to contribute to the development of more inclusive, resilient, and publicly valuable cultural policy frameworks.