You Don’t Fund a Forest by Paying for Leaves

Culture, Funding, and What Arts Pollicy Keeps Getting Wrong

I put up a post on social media last week that got a lot of attention. The bit that resonated was this

“But culture (arts, community, youth etc) does not behave like a product line. It behaves like soil. You don’t fund a forest by paying for leaves. You fund it by protecting the conditions in which growth is possible: time, trust, continuity, and shared meaning…many of our funding instruments are not neutral. They actively reshape the cultural field – and often in ways that contradict stated policy goals. Funding tools can create the problems they are designed to solve.”

I was surprised how much attention this post got, particularly by one comment: “That feels like a genuine discovery. And rarely in dialogue in this topic have I heard genuine discovery. It sounds like a treatise that needs to be disseminated where it can affect comprehension and change.”

So that felt like a bit of a challenge!! So this is my thinking behind the forest leaves metaphor and why there’s never enough money in the arts,

First, there is a fundamental mistake running through arts and cultural policy. It’s been there so long it’s almost impossible to see.

Public policy works on the assumption that funding responds to problems.

In reality, funding tools can create/aggravate the very problems they are designed to solve.

Now, this is not because policymakers are careless, nor because institutions are corrupt, and it’s not because artists are ungrateful. The reason is simple and it’s a really common mistake. The state, politicians, bureaucrats and other agencies keep misidentifying the object of cultural policy – and then they build instruments that reshape reality to fit the mistake.

The result of this mistake is a system that appears busy, inclusive, and productive, but is actually and quietly destroying the conditions that make culture/art possible in the first place.

The Forest and the Leaves

Let’s take a second to consider this metaphor. You don’t fund a forest by paying for leaves but cultural policy has become very good at funding leaves, as we all know.

Projects. Events. Outputs. Participants. Audiences. Artefacts. These fit neatly into applications, assessment criteria, and annual budgets. They can be measured, reported, and justified.

But culture – unfortunately – doesn’t live in outputs. It lives in conditions.

Time. Trust. Continuity. Shared memory. Informal learning. Intergenerational transmission. Risk-bearing capacity. These are not incidental to culture, they are its soil.

So here’s another great sound bite: when we fund only what we can see, we weaken what allows anything to grow.

The “three body problem”

At the root of the problem is a “conceptual collapse” that policy language rarely acknowledges.

Creativity, culture, and art are routinely treated as if they were the same thing and they are not.

So let’s take a moment to break it down – to name the parts as it were. Creativity is a given – a universal human capacity.

Culture emerges from the convergence of individual and group creativity over time.

Culture produces artefacts: and these are traces, indications, of a society thinking about itself.

Some of these artefacts endure, and we call these Art.

Art then feeds back into culture, reshaping imagination, language, and possibility.

This is a cycle, not a hierarchy.

Unfortunately, when policy collapses this cycle into a single category – ‘“the arts” – it creates impossible expectations:

creativity is treated as something to be allocated or produced, culture is treated as something to be delivered, art is treated as something to be predicted, and funding is expected to function simultaneously as welfare, evaluation, and validation.

Essentially the funding/policy system becomes incoherent because the model is incoherent.

Funding Is Not Neutral

Funding is often spoken about as if it were passive support – the beneficence of an enlightened state.

It’s not that!

Funding is a design tool.

Every funding instrument encodes a theory of how culture (and the arts) works:

project funding assumes culture is episodic, competitive calls assume scarcity and competition produce quality, pre-declared outcomes assume culture is predictable, individualised grants assume resilience is personal.

These assumptions just aren’t articulated, but they are enforced daily through forms, deadlines, assessment criteria, and reporting requirements.

And the arts eco- system behaves accordingly.

Time fragments. Risk is pushed downward onto individuals. Learning becomes performative. Collaboration becomes irrational. Continuity is quietly penalised.

These are not failures of character or competence. They are logical outcomes of the policy tools currently in use.

How Funding Creates Its Own Justification

The irony, or perhaps the joke, is that despite the fact we observe the outcomes produced by this system – precarity, fragmentation, exhaustion – we respond by intensifying the same logic.

We see instability, so we introduce more short-term grants.

We see fragmentation, so we add more competitive schemes.

We see lack of depth, so we demand clearer outcomes in advance.

We see exclusion, so we spread smaller amounts thinner.

Each response treats a system effect as if it were a localised failure.

This is how funding architectures become self-justifying: the damage they cause becomes the evidence for their expansion.

The forest weakens and the leaves multiply. It’s self harm at a systemic level.

The Quiet Substitution of Welfare for Cultural Policy

This is a really fascinating aspect of the great funding mistake and nowhere is it clearer than in the way cultural funding has been asked to absorb failures elsewhere in the state.

Because there is no coherent income architecture for artists, arts funding has quietly become:

income support, labour-market correction, wellbeing intervention, social policy proxy.

All without the scale, authority, or design to do these jobs properly.

This is not compassionate it is simply avoiding the issue,

When welfare is smuggled through cultural funding, both systems are distorted:

cultural policy becomes moralised, funding decisions become confused, and culture is instrumentalised to solve problems it did not create.

Arts funding should not be concerned with artists welfare because that’s a welfare /human rights issue not an arts issue.

Separating income support from cultural funding is not technocratic tidying – it is conceptual honesty.

Culture Is a Condition, Not an Activity

Let’s try and pull all this together. The central error is this:

Cultural policy treats culture (and therefore arts) as an activity when it is a condition.

Activities can be funded episodically, but the conditions that produce those activities must be sustained.

Culture, however, behaves like a field:

relational rather than transactional, cumulative rather than episodic, place-based rather than mobile, time-dependent rather than immediate.

Project funding is excellent at producing events, but it’s very poor at sustaining fields.

When the project approach becomes the dominant logic, depth declines even as activity increases. We just get more stuff.

What an Effective Alternative Requires

A different outcome does not need better intentions, or a more refined language, but it desperately needs better models and better tools.

It is my belief that an effective cultural funding architecture would:

Fund conditions as infrastructure. Time, continuity, coordination, reflection, and learning are not overheads. They are the system. We need to accept that cultural value is retrospective: what endures cannot be predicted. Autonomy and unevenness, failure, are not flaws: they are conditions of seriousness. We need to mix funding instruments deliberately because direct grants stabilise time and risk; income supports belong in welfare, and tax systems drive investment and engagement. No single policy/funding instrument can do all the work. We need to evaluate coherence, not volume. Retention, collaboration, memory, and capacity tell us more about cultural health than output counts ever will.

What This Implies About the State

If we take all this seriously, it leads us to an uncomfortable conclusion.

The state currently relates to culture as something it funds, uses, and depends on – but does not recognise as a form of public intelligence.

So, in the absence of a robust theory of culture and art, administration and funding step in.

Application forms and guidelines replace understanding, metrics replace meaning, and competitive funding replaces stewardship.

Essentially, culture and the arts are tolerated so long as they remain legible and useful.

But their deepest value lies precisely in what resists legibility: ambiguity, contradiction, deep time, critique, and shared sense-making.

A state that cannot accommodate this is not hostile to culture.

It is simply incoherent.

The Point of the Forest

The forest metaphor works because it exposes the mistake cleanly.

Leaves matter; but they are not the forest.

Projects matter; but they are not culture.

If you fund only what you can see, you will destroy what allows anything to grow

The question really is not whether to fund culture more “generously”. It is whether the state is willing to redesign the invisible infrastructure that shapes cultural life:

funding logics, time horizons, risk distribution, and the boundaries between culture, welfare, and civic participation.

Until that happens, we will continue to get the same outcomes – with better language, kinder intentions, and more exhausted systems.

That is not failure of will, it is failure of design.