The text, “Europe for Culture – Culture for Europe”, sets out twelve key principles intended to inspire, if not guide, cultural policies in member states. Among them is the principle of culture as a health issue. The Commission explicitly draws on the conclusions of an expert report from the member states, Culture for Health, which highlights the beneficial effects of culture on health and well-being.
Culture is no longer defended only as heritage, as a source of attachment and belonging for individuals, or as an economic driver in the creative industries sector. It is becoming a resource for public health and social cohesion.
Culture as care
This shift is part of a broader movement, which is already inspiring pilot projects and policy directions at several levels, and is giving new priority to neuroscientific research into the effects of cultural practices on the brain and well-being. The European network Culture Next has also published a report, “Culture as Care: Participation, Health and Collective Well-Being in European Cities”, which directly extends the terms of the declaration.
The report describes culture not as a substitute for social, health or education policies, but as something that creates care through participation itself – through the spaces for encounter, mutual recognition and collective action that it makes possible.
It places particular emphasis on young people, calling for a move beyond an access-based approach — bringing young people into cultural institutions, as in the French theoretical and political framework of cultural democratisation — in order to recognise their already active role as creators and organisers, often outside institutional frameworks, in a perspective closer to that of cultural rights.
A health ecosystem
The European Commission report Culture and Health – Time to Act (2025) recommends developing a health ecosystem to address a series of social and health phenomena characterising Europe today and contributing to a progressive deterioration in overall health conditions, both physical and mental, including post-pandemic burnout, population ageing, rising social isolation, armed conflicts and growing inequalities.
The concept of a health ecosystem was originally proposed in a 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) report, titled “What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?” (“What are the real beneficial effects of practising the arts on health and well-being?”).
According to this report, artistic activities simultaneously mobilise aesthetic engagement, imagination, sensory activation, emotional evocation and cognitive stimulation, which trigger concrete and positive psychological, physiological, social and behavioural responses for health.
Pioneering initiatives
In reality, these reports are only formalising a movement already underway in a number of pioneering cultural institutions. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) was one of the first museums to formalise, with the help of health professionals, a cultural offer adapted to a clinically defined audience: people with Alzheimer’s disease.
From 2006, the Meet Me at MoMA programme has offered monthly interactive, guided visits of the collections during public closing hours. The aim is to create a space for expression and exchange for people in the early and intermediate stages of the disease, using iconic works of modern art. It was an early step towards recognising the role that museum spaces can play in well-being.
In 2018, the art historian Nathalie Bondil, then director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, launched, with the help of Canadian French-speaking doctors, the “museum prescription” scheme: a partner doctor can refer a patient to a museum visit when they anticipate a benefit for the patient’s health.
Since becoming director of the museum and exhibitions at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, Nathalie Bondil has helped spread this model in Europe, notably through the concept of “museum therapy”, now accepted and taught by public institutions in France such as the Institut national du patrimoine (INP) and the École du Louvre in their training for museum professionals and future professionals.
In France, the “Culture at the hospital” programme was formalised as early as 1999 by the first national interministerial agreement. Regularly renewed — in 2010, and then in July 2025 — this partnership framework between the culture and health ministries makes explicit the intention to go beyond the logic of artistic presence in hospitals and embrace a broader ambition of health promotion and prevention through culture.
From access to participation
The broader policy shift highlighted by these initiatives reflects a growing recognition that culture can do more than enrich public life. It can support mental and physical health, create spaces of connection and strengthen collective life. In this reading, museums, theatres, arts organisations and cultural networks are not peripheral to social policy but part of a wider ecosystem in which participation itself has value.
That idea is central to the new European framing. Culture is presented not only as something to be consumed, but as something lived, practised and shared. The emphasis on participation also points to a more active understanding of cultural citizenship, particularly among young people whose artistic and organisational work may take place outside established institutions.
For cultural policy in Belgium and elsewhere in Europe, the Brussels declaration marks a notable development. It places culture within the language of health, care and resilience, while linking European institutions to practices already tested in museums, hospitals and city networks. Whether this leads to lasting change will depend on how far governments and cultural bodies turn these principles into sustained policy.