Scaffolding agency in cultural policy: a capabilities framework for evaluating cultural interventions

The role of culture in promoting social and behavioral change has gained increasing attention in cultural policy, yet mechanisms of intervention, which we situate on a spectrum ranging from nudges to cultural interventions, remain insufficiently conceptualized. This lack of clarity obscures how different interventions relate to one another and complicates their evaluation, contributing to the well-known limitations of “toolkit” approaches. This paper develops a unifying framework that understands interventions as ways of scaffolding agency across multiple dimensions.

Drawing on the capabilities approach, philosophy, and situated cognition, we argue that nudges and cultural interventions are best conceived as points on a spectrum defined by the degree of agency they afford. This perspective provides principled criteria for both intervention design and impact assessment, offering an alternative to reductive evaluation models while accommodating the complexity of cultural engagement. Thanks are due to Albert Newen for helpful comments and suggestions, and to an audience at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum for stimulating discussion of an earlier version of this paper.

AV acknowledges sponsorship by the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study (HWK), the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the Research Training Group “Situated Cognition” (project number GRK 2185/2), and the DFG Project “Naïve Realism Under Pressure” (project number 527893220). Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy metaLAB, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Institut für Philosophie und Politikwissenschaft, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Correspondence to Giulia Candeloro or Alfredo Vernazzani.

PLS was a member of the Editorial Board of this journal. The manuscript was assessed in line with the journal’s standard editorial processes, including its policy on competing interests. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.

If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Candeloro, G., Sacco, P.L. & Vernazzani, A.