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1. Governance

2. Cross-sectorial cooperation

Governance

Ministry of Culture

The Ministry of Culture (Kulturdepartementet) is responsible for issues relating to culture and media.

The Swedish Arts Council

The Swedish Arts Council (Kulturrådet) is a public authority under the Swedish Ministry of Culture, with the task to promote cultural development and access to culture, based on the national cultural policy objectives. The Council achieves this by allocating and monitoring state funding, alongside with other promotional activities. 

Under its mandate, the Swedish Arts Council focuses in particular on developing activities of artistic and cultural merit relating to:

• independent cultural activities in the performing arts and music
• literature, arts periodicals, reading promotion and public libraries
• graphic art and design, museums and exhibitions
• regional cultural activities
• the culture of the Sami people and other national minority groups
• other cultural areas.

The Swedish government has given the council the tasks of promoting the right of children and young people to culture, encouraging cultural diversity, and fostering equality. These issues must be addressed in all operational areas. The Swedish Arts Council is also responsible for disability policy in the field of culture.

The Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis

The Swedish Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis (Myndigheten för kulturanalys), under the Swedish Ministry of Culture, is assigned by the Government to evaluate, analyse and present the effects of proposals and measures taken in the cultural field. This is to be done based on the cultural policy objectives. The aim of the agency is to provide a substantial contribution to the development of cultural policy, to support the government and in this way create better prerequisites for those active in the cultural field.

The agency is responsible for main parts of the official statistics within the spheres of culture and leisure. The agency strives to monitor, illustrate and analyse trends and developments nationally and in other countries and in associated areas of policy. The agency also has a research task, which implies monitoring research in the cultural field and the area of evaluation both nationally and internationally. A part of the task is to carry out a cultural habit survey (kulturvaneundersökning), with a special focus on children's and young people's cultural habits. The results of the first survey among children and young people in compulsory and upper secondary school were published in 2017 (Kulturfakta 17:5).

The Swedish National Heritage Board

The Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet), under the Swedish Ministry of Culture, is Sweden’s central administrative agency in the area of cultural heritage, cultural and historic environment. Its assignment includes ensuring that the cultural value of buildings and landscapes is preserved, utilized and developed, as well as watching over the interests of the cultural heritage and cultural environment in community planning and construction.

Local government

Sweden has 290 municipalities with local governments. The local authorities have a considerable degree of autonomy and have independent powers of taxation. Many decisions that concern young people are taken at municipal level. The municipalities are responsible (partly in some policy areas) for youth policy issues such as schools, employment and training, health care, social care and services, youth work, culture and leisure.

The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (Sveriges kommuner och Regioner, SKR), represents and advocates for local government in Sweden. All of Sweden's municipalities and regions are members of SKR. 

Cross-sectorial cooperation

The Government finances regional cultural activities together with regions, county councils and municipalities.

National level

There are certain national cultural institutions that receive funding directly from the government, such as the Royal Opera (Kungliga Operan), the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, Swedish Travelling Exhibitions (Riksutställningar) and Music Development and Heritage Sweden (Statens Musikverk).

Regions

In every region there are theatres, music institutions, regional libraries and museums. These often function as regional centres in their respective cultural spheres, working together with schools, the business community and others. Regional and municipal heads of these organisations have financial responsibility for their own institutions, and thereby decisive influence over the scope and nature of their activities.

However, since 2011, the state has been promoting the establishment of a regional network of institutions, providing substantial funding each year. The collaborative cultural model (kultursamverkan) allocates state allowances to regional cultural activities. County councils and regions included in the model decide how to allocate the government grant to regional cultural activities. The purpose of the collaborative cultural model is to contribute to achieving national cultural policy goals, as well as providing opportunities to regional priorities and variations.

Municipalities

In Sweden's 290 municipalities there are cultural institutions that are funded by local income taxes, e.g. public libraries, art museums and municipal music and arts schools for children and young people specialising in music, theatre and arts. In certain cases, the state provides funding for projects and special commissions.

Cooperation between formal and non-formal cultural education

In smaller municipalities, civil society organisations, such as study associations (studieförbund) and non-formal liberal adult education (vuxenutbildning), are key actors in the local cultural sphere. The study associations are financed by both municipal and government grants, besides student fees. Study associations may have some form of cooperation with the cultural school.

Municipal culture schools/music and arts schools

The municipal culture school, also referred as music and art school, has a long tradition of close collaboration with compulsory and upper secondary schools. The most common form of cooperation is that arts school operates in schools, either during or after school hours.

Another common form of cooperation is combined services for teachers, that is teaching music or arts both in schools and in arts schools. Arts schools may also have more administrative functions, such as coordinating cultural events in schools - for example theatre and dance performances, museum visits, cinema, music events etc.

Municipal culture schools offer voluntary extracurricular activities for children and adolescents for a relatively low individual fee. The activities take commonly part once a week, either during or after the school day. Most of the schools offer music lessons on a wide range of instruments, solo singing and choirs. Moreover, lessons in dancing, drama/theatre, arts and media are frequent but there are also schools that have circus, rhythm and acrobatics.

According to the Swedish Arts Council's latest follow-up report from 2022, (Kulturskolan i siffror) municipal cultural or music schools are found in almost all, 286, of the country's 290 municipalities. As a rule, the municipalities carry out the activities under their own auspices. Some more interesting facts som the report are:

• Music, in the form of individual teaching, teaching in small groups and in an orchestra/choir or equivalent, is by far the most common subject in cultural schools. All responding municipalities offer music in some form in long and/or short courses. This is followed in turn by dance, theatre/drama, image/form and film/animation as the most common subjects in the cultural school.
• Girls make up 64% of the participation opportunities compared to boys' 36%. The difference between the sexes in dance and musicals is particularly large. Boys are only in the majority in the subject film/animation.
• Of the responding municipalities, 83% offered some form of targeted activity to a specific target group. The most common was arranging activities for children and young people with disabilities (53%), 45% had targeted courses for children and young people in rural areas and 41% for socio-economically vulnerable children.
• Almost three-quarters of the municipalities had queues for the cultural school. Of the children and young people who stood in the queue, 67% were made up of individuals who do not take any course in the cultural school and 33% of those who are already taking one or more courses in the cultural school.

Financing of culture schools

The vast majority of Swedish municipal culture/music and arts schools are run by local municipalities. This means that each school is governed by local representatives using funds allocated from local budgets. Arts schools have been established in 285 of 290 municipalities. The local municipality, or in some cases, a local organisation runs the school. The activities are mainly financed by the local municipality, but there is an obligatory student fee. The fee per term is in average 656 SEK (69 euros). All information in this paragraph is based on Swedish government's official report from 2016, on municipal culture schools. 

Government's contributions to the municipal cultural school activities mainly consist of three parts; grants for development, support for improved skills provision and support for national coordination:

• The development grant, which from 2023 will amount to SEK 100 million, aims to support the municipalities in the work of developing the cultural school in broadening the activities and reaching more children. The grant is distributed by the Culture School Centre, at the Swedish Arts Council (Kulturrådet).
• The government has also initiated support for improved skills provision, the Culture School Step, which will contribute to the culture school being able to offer children and young people high-quality teaching in various ways of expression, regardless of conditions. The investment is permanent and amounts to SEK 40 million annually.
• A national Cultural School Center (Kulturskolecentrum) has existed since 2018 within the Swedish Arts Council. The task of the cultural school center is to support municipal cultural school activities in terms of exchange of experience, collaboration and follow-up. The center distributes the cultural school grant, and an important task is to collect and analyze national statistics regarding cultural school activities.

The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions

The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (Sveriges kommuner och regioner, SKR) decided in 2015 to ensure that local culture schools have real opportunities to contribute to the goal of every child's right to culture. In 2022, the municipalities invested about SEK 2.9 billion (about 252 million euros) on children’s and young people's opportunities to take part in the activities of municipal music and arts schools, according to SKR.