Cultural Rights: Levers of Public Innovation in the Service of Ethical Cultural Policies

Faced with multiple social transitions, French cultural policies, implemented by the State and local authorities, must innovate to concern all users. Cultural rights are at the heart of this social innovation. Cultural rights can be an opportunity to renew our public policies. Each elected official, whatever their area of expertise, can use it, in their own way, to give people in a territory a real place as Authors (Florian Salazar-Martin, president of the FNCC [National Federation of Territorial Communities for Culture]). They are defined by the Fribourg Declaration (1993, 2007) and recognized by the United Nations (UN), United Nations for Education, Sciences and Culture Organization (UNESCO), and the Council of Europe. This chapter aims to explore cultural rights as vectors of social ethics to initiate inclusive cultural public policies. This chapter will discuss (1) the recognition of cultural rights as a response to social ethical aspirations; (2) innovative cultural public policies relating to cultural rights; and (3) a typology of practices and methods of application in matters of cultural rights in public cultural establishments. To understand these current phenomena and innovative practices relating to cultural rights, we will analyze the speeches of major public policy actors and different stakeholders in the sector. The empirical part will consist of using the ALCESTE softwareⒸ, of analyzing the corpus constituted, and of drawing up a classification of the intentions and actions carried out by cultural rights and their actors. We will ultimately analyze how cultural rights can fuel public innovation and how they are implemented to guarantee the diversity of cultural expressions for the purposes of inclusiveness.