Finnish cultural policy has been actively developed in recent years. In 2009, the Ministry of Education and Culture drew up its own strategy for cultural policy that extends to 2020, while a government report on the future of culture was completed in 2010.

These two documents discuss the changes affecting the cultural policy operating environment, set development targets and propose concrete measures for achieving them. However, simply setting targets and measures is not in itself enough. These days, the implementation of measures within central government needs to be monitored to determine whether the measures have achieved the targets set and whether the targets have been socio-politically relevant.

As part of its strategic development work, the Ministry of Education and Culture carried out a cultural policy indicator project. The project was conducted jointly with Statistics Finland and Cupore, the Finnish Foundation for Cultural Policy Research. According to the assignment, the cultural policy indicator development project aimed to: 1) identify and define the key areas of cultural policy effectiveness indicators needed within the cultural administration supervised by the Ministry of Education and Culture, 2) review the need for information on the quantitative and qualitative indicators related to these, 3) collect, where possible, the required indicator data concerning the areas of effectiveness indicators or initiate action to acquire any missing data, 4) develop the statistics and information production system for the culture sector, based on the needs mentioned above, or recommend development measures, as well as 5) draw up a report on cultural policy indicators, describing the key observations and results related to the project’s objectives.

The resulting report examines the need to create indicators on the societal effectiveness of cultural policy and the opportunities to create such indicators from the perspective of strengthening the knowledge base for cultural policy. It is very challenging to determine the sector’s societal effectiveness due to the nature of artistic and cultural activities. Cultural activities are creative, active and dynamic and their impact is related to human experiences and interpretations. Moreover, the causal relationships of impacts are difficult to pinpoint and may not appear until quite some time has passed.