The crisis we face is not technical; it is cultural.
Legitimacy, place and the systems that shape change
We will not address our shared challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss or social fragmentation, while culture remains sidelined in how change is designed and delivered. Change stalls not only because of technical or political barriers, but because our systems are not built to work with how meaning and legitimacy form within places.
This provocation argues that culture is not just a sector alongside others, but the relational foundation through which change becomes possible – and that policy, funding and governance must be designed accordingly.
A fuller analysis and case studies can be found in the AHRC research paper ‘Culture and 21st-Century Challenges’. Matt Rabagliati is a 2023 Clore Fellow working at the intersection of culture, sustainability and systems change.
Introduction
Let’s be clear: the foundation of every place is not just its land or economy, but its culture.
My own story began in the Chiltern Hills, a landscape formed over 10,000 years by generations of people. It is a demonstration of how human culture continually reimagines and transforms places, seen in the chalk streams, Roman roads, medieval churches, and field systems.
My childhood was shaped by this place and the stories my grandparents told me of previous generations who had lived here, visited here, and belonged here. It’s a place I’ve always felt very attached to and grounded in. After more than a decade living in London, I recently moved back with my young family to find that same sense of rootedness, community, and place. On the surface, the towns and landscapes appear essentially unchanged. Many faces are, too, perhaps like mine, just a little more distinguished. But a big change is stirring under the surface.
Standing atop the local late Bronze Age hill fort of Ivinghoe Beacon, I met Dr Wendy Morrison, Heritage and Archaeology Manager for the Chilterns National Landscape. Together, we spoke about the pressures facing this place. Ancient monuments, settlements and ecosystems are under increasing strain from complex, interlocking pressures. Extreme heat and drought are altering ancient forests and biodiversity. Increased rainfall is causing local historic churches to crumble. Change has always shaped this landscape, but the speed and scale now feel different.
Dr Morrison’s response is no longer to treat these pressures in isolation. Through the Chilterns Heritage and Archaeology Partnership (CHAP), she is bringing together cultural organisations, communities and stakeholders to develop a shared, coordinated approach for heritage and archaeology across the landscape. Her work reflects a growing recognition that local responses to global challenges must be systemic, relational, grounded in a place’s culture and identity, and shaped by those who live there.
This localised, culturally informed approach raises a wider question: if culture shapes how places interpret and respond to change, what kinds of systems are we designing to support that work? For Dr Morrison, this involves the challenging task of bringing together a traditionally siloed and precarious local cultural sector, with limited resources and a reliance on short-term project funding.
Where meaning is made: Culture and the culture sector
Over the past nine years, my work has explored how interlinked challenges – from climate change to biodiversity loss – play out in local places. These are shared global challenges, but every community experiences and responds to them differently, formed by its own social, cultural, ecological and historical context, and by the specific ways in which those pressures manifest in that place.
This has led me to see that sustainability challenges are not simply technical problems to be solved. They are also questions of how change is understood and negotiated within the stories communities hold about themselves and their places. In this sense, they are questions of meaning, identity and legitimacy as much as evidence or policy. When change does not feel legitimate within those shared narratives, it stalls, regardless of how strong the technical case may be.
Places have always changed. But today’s environmental, social, economic and digital pressures are compounding and accelerating that change, altering how people live and relate to one another. At the same time, many of the shared spaces and cultural processes through which communities interpret and negotiate change are thinning or shifting. This creates a growing gap between lived transformation and the narratives that help make sense of it.
To understand how this plays out, it helps to distinguish between three related but different things:
- Culture in its broadest sense: the web of meanings, narratives and relationships through which communities and people interpret the world around them. In this sense, culture shapes identity and belonging, and influences what feels legitimate, threatening or possible.
- The cultural sector – museums, heritage organisations, arts bodies and libraries – is one of the few parts of culture that societies intentionally fund and govern. These institutions, emerging in the 19th century, do not constitute culture itself, but they help hold and mediate the narratives through which communities understand their past and imagine their future.
- Cultural leadership operates across this wider terrain. It connects lived experience, institutional practice and decision-making, often working at the boundaries between sectors to help communities interpret change and negotiate legitimate responses.
Here lies a tension. While culture underpins how communities interpret and negotiate change, many of the institutions tasked with stewarding it were designed for stability and preservation, not for the scale and pace of transformation now underway. Inherited institutions and narratives are struggling to keep pace as landscapes, economies, and identities rapidly shift.
Research I co-led with communities in Scotland’s River Nith catchment illustrates this. Although villages faced similar environmental pressures, workshops showed how each community’s relationship to its land, rivers and livelihoods shaped how those pressures were understood and what kinds of adaptation were considered legitimate. It was the cultural relationships, more than technical evidence alone, that shaped how communities imagined their futures and the trade-offs they were willing to accept. They also brought up questions about the cultural and social infrastructure available in each place to support collective conversations about change.
If culture shapes how places respond, then the systems we design to address change must reflect that reality. However, as we look at current policy and funding structures, we still assume that change can be delivered independently of where meaning is actually made.
From recognition to contradiction
Over the past decade, the language of complexity and systems has proliferated. Place-based approaches, devolution, collective social innovation, living labs, and systems thinking are now part of a shared lexicon. There is widespread acknowledgement that top-down, siloed delivery cannot address complex, interrelated challenges.
Yet a persistent contradiction remains. Although the aforementioned challenges are now widely recognised as systemic, they are still often addressed through systems and policies that treat them as separate, technical problems, largely detached from place. We have learned to speak the language of complexity while continuing to govern through 20th-century structures designed to break it apart.
To understand how we arrived here, James C. Scott offers a compelling genesis story. In Seeing Like a State, he describes how, from the 18th to 20th centuries, governments systematically replaced rich, local knowledge with simplified, centralised systems. Fields were straightened, forests were “rationalised”, and communities were reorganised. The messy, embedded wisdom of place, ecology, custom, story, and practice was overwritten by a high-modernist belief in standardisation and control. Scott’s argument is not anti-state: it is a warning that when systems ignore local knowledge and meaning, they may appear efficient but consistently fail when confronted with complexity.
A recent UK Government evaluation reached a similar conclusion. The 2024 review of the Partnerships for People and Place programme, spanning eleven national departments and multiple local authorities, found that significant change is consistently blocked by the very silos Scott warned about: fragmented structures, misaligned priorities, inflexible funding, and a default assumption that central government “knows best”. The report’s conclusion could have been written by Scott himself, in arguing that instead of consulting a civil servant in London, ‘we should look to our communities, who have shown time and again that they are experts in their place, able and willing to develop and deliver innovative locally-led work to tackle the challenges they face’.
This enduring gap between rhetoric and reality points to the urgent need for systems that genuinely empower local knowledge and agency, an issue at the heart of the transformation now required.
The Limits of Evidence
The problem is not a lack of evidence and technical knowledge, but the assumption that evidence and metrics alone can tell us what our places should become.
Policy has become increasingly sophisticated at diagnosing complexity. Yet, it remains far less capable of engaging with the cultural dimensions through which change is negotiated, contested, and made legitimate in our communities. Frameworks such as heritage and cultural capital have helped culture survive and speak within policy systems that demand measurable value and returns. Yet these frameworks also reveal the limits of such systems. They position culture as something to be valued within an existing structure, rather than as a force that might reshape how that structure works. Valuation can help make culture visible, but it cannot create the conditions for it to act.
When value is primarily framed in terms of what can be measured, priced, or compared, meaning disappears, and value is sanitised. Not “meaning” as sentiment or nostalgia, but as structure. Evidence tells us that a place floods more often, but it cannot tell us which stories people are willing to let go, what constitutes acceptable loss, or who has the authority to decide. These are cultural questions, ones that demand negotiation and shared understanding, not just measurement.
Two futures for our places
This leaves us caught between two approaches to the future of our places.
The first continues along a familiar path, treating climate, nature, and social challenges primarily as technical, siloed problems to be solved through top-down expertise and increasingly data-driven systems. Within this model, the cultural sector sits alongside others, helping to communicate change, build support or demonstrate value, but remains largely peripheral to decision-making, shaped by systems built for efficiency and control.
The second approach starts from a different premise: that the challenges we face are fundamentally relational. They concern how people understand their place, what they value and which futures feel legitimate. Here, culture is not one sector among many, but the underlying infrastructure through which shared meaning, trust and collective imagination are formed – the platform upon which societies operate.
This does not mean placing culture on a pedestal. Culture is not always unifying; it can also exclude, reinforce boundaries, or privilege certain narratives and communities over others. It can also perpetuate stories and narratives that no longer correspond to the nature-depleted world around them. But this is precisely why it cannot be treated as peripheral. The tensions within culture, between continuity and change, belonging and openness, memory and reinvention, are the very terrain on which sustainability challenges are negotiated. Attempting to bypass these tensions through purely technical solutions does not resolve them; it often displaces or deepens them.
This is precisely where cultural leadership becomes critical: not to smooth over differences, but to create the conditions in which competing narratives can be expressed, contested and renegotiated over time. Recognising culture as foundational does not mean preserving it unchanged, but working within it to enable legitimate forms of transformation.
If this second approach is taken seriously, then the role of the cultural sector and its leadership changes fundamentally: from supporting change at the margins to becoming central to how places navigate transformation.
The role of cultural institutions in a time of transition
If culture sits at the heart of how places interpret and navigate change, then the demands on the cultural sector are now far greater than its current design allows.
Across many places, cultural leaders are already doing this relational work – convening partners, holding and navigating contested conversations, reinterpreting cultural narratives, and bridging evidence with lived experience. Cultural infrastructure, from heritage sites and festivals to libraries, museums and community venues, provides the spaces where communities interpret and adapt to change together. Notably, these roles have emerged despite existing systems, not because of them. Much of this work sits outside formal sustainability programmes and is rarely recognised in accompanying policy frameworks. Yet it is often the difference between technical interventions taking root or failing.
Yet the cultural sector remains structured around project funding, short-term outputs, disciplinary silos, and fragile infrastructure. We have recognised culture’s importance faster than we have redesigned the systems that support it.
If culture is foundational to how places navigate change, then our systems must be redesigned accordingly:
- First, investment in cultural infrastructure – not only buildings, but the networks, relationships and practices that hold memory, identity and trust over time. Where this infrastructure is strong, communities are better equipped to interpret and respond to change collectively.
- Second, integrated policy, organisational and funding systems at every level that reflect the real, cross-cutting nature of lived experience. The culture sector often works across culture, heritage, nature, community development and education, yet funding and governance remain siloed.
- Third, relational forms of leadership and governance that devolve not only delivery, but real judgment. Effective place-based work depends on trusting local actors to interpret evidence, negotiate trade-offs and shape responses that are legitimate within their own contexts.
- Fourth, a culture of working openly. Relational change relies on ideas and practices moving between places. This requires systems that support shared learning: spreading approaches, making successes and failures visible, welcoming challenges and connecting communities across sectors and geographies.
- Fifth, make innovation intrinsic to the culture sector. Not an occasional initiative, but a habitual way of working that is embedded in everyday practice. This calls for sustained investment in the well-being, imagination and cognitive resources of those working in culture, so they have the energy and capacity to adapt, experiment, and thrive amid change.
These are not additional features of sustainability policy, but are the conditions for it to work.
However, this need for change comes at a time when both cultural and lived infrastructure are already under strain. Across many places, participation in shared cultural life is declining. Communal institutions are closing, voluntary structures are ageing, and social life is increasingly mediated through private or digital spaces. Culture remains foundational, but the spaces through which it is negotiated together are thinning or becoming increasingly digital and removed from place.
This is not an argument for nostalgia or preservation of fixed traditions. Instead, it is precisely why cultural infrastructure matters: where spaces for shared meaning disappear, technical solutions struggle to take root. The task now is not to add culture to existing systems, but to design systems around the cultural and relational realities through which change actually happens.
Conclusion
Places always change. The Chilterns have shown me that since childhood. But today’s interconnected pressures are accelerating that change as never before.
The real choice is not whether culture matters, but how we organise for change. One path treats culture as just another sector within systems designed for delivery and control. The other recognises culture as the relational foundation through which communities imagine, negotiate and shape their futures. Continuing to treat culture as peripheral will not produce the adaptation we need.
If we want true resilience, then our policy, funding and governance systems must be designed accordingly. This means investing in long-term cultural infrastructure, enabling governance that supports cross-sector work, and adopting leadership models that devolve decision-making and delivery. Without these shifts, culture will continue to be asked to do relational work within systems designed for transaction.
At the heart of this challenge is our changing relationship to place. In some areas, strong communities of place endure; in others, attachment is more diffuse, shaped as much by digital networks and mobility as by geography. Nostalgia alone cannot hold this together, but neither can technocratic optimism. Places continue to shape our sense of belonging, safety and meaning, often in ways we barely notice. The task, then, is not to preserve static traditions but to create the conditions in which new forms of belonging can emerge. Cultural infrastructure, the spaces and practices through which people encounter one another, remains essential to this work. Where these spaces weaken, collective responses to change become harder to sustain.
As Sue Clifford of the Common Ground project noted at the turn of the millennium, nature will endure whatever our actions bring. It is we who are in danger. We need to live better with the world and ground ourselves. To understand ‘our place, find meaning and take steps to cherish and enrich our own patch of land demands that we change our ways, share our knowledge, get involved, we have to know what is of real value to us, where we are, and find new ways of belonging’.
The impact of cultural experiences on a human life cannot be quantified. Until we accept that there can be no metric for measuring joy, comfort, complexity, imagination or bravery, we will continue to overlook the power of culture to shape lives and the future of our places.
To meet the challenges of the 21st century, policymakers, funders, and leaders must place culture at the heart of their strategies-investing in the infrastructure, leadership, and systems that enable communities to create meaning together. Only then can we build truly resilient, adaptive places for the future.
Themes Climate Leadership Leadership Styles Qualities of Leadership Sector Insights
