Why Participation Infrastructure? Some further thinking

I shared some thoughts on participation infrastructure for earlier - the how of it, mostly. What it might look like, how it could work, what systems and structures we'd need. The response has been encouraging. Lots of people nodding along, wanting to take action, ready to get practical about implementation.

Then Seb Chan asked me a simple question: but why?

My first response was honest but insufficient: because I care about it, and it makes sense to me. Which is true. But "I care" isn't really an argument -  it's a starting point, maybe, but not a foundation for the kind of systemic change we're talking about.

So I've been sitting with the why question. Going back into the research. Trying to articulate what's actually at stake here beyond my own intuitions and convictions. These are some further thoughts  - not a complete answer, but an attempt to put some evidence and reasoning behind the instinct that this matters.

What follows isn't polished argumentation. It's me thinking through different dimensions of why participation infrastructure might be important, what the evidence suggests, where the uncertainties remain. Consider it an invitation to think alongside me rather than a definitive case.

The Social Cohesion Argument

Let me start with the most developed argument, because it's the one that's been occupying most of my thinking lately. Social cohesion matters because, fundamentally, it's about whether we can actually function together as a society.

The Scanlon Institute describes social cohesion as "the willingness of members of society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper." Without it, we lack the sense of belonging and connected communities that enable participation in society. We lack trust in each other and in our institutions  - which form the foundations of community, business, and democracy.

Australia's social cohesion has declined from 100 points in 2007 to around 85 points in 2024  - the worst results on record. Young people aged 18-34 report particularly low levels of belonging and trust in others compared to older cohorts. The cost of living, debates about migration, international conflicts  - these are testing the bonds between us in real and measurable ways.

Here's what interests me about the participation infrastructure angle: cultural and creative engagement shows up consistently as a contributor to cohesion in ways that cut across typical policy boundaries.

National household data reveals that attending community events (fetes, shows, festivals) is the single highest contributor to community participation beyond spending time with family and friends. It's also the strongest contributor to civic engagement. People who attend arts events are 3.8 times more likely to volunteer than non-attendees, even after controlling for education, gender, and demographics.

Cultural participation is especially useful in transcending conventional social barriers. It creates spaces where diverse people come together around shared experiences rather than shared backgrounds.

But there's a trust dimension here that feels particularly important right now. Australians trust cultural institutions far more than government institutions. Libraries (80%), museums (78%), and galleries (67%) versus federal government (42%), state/territory (55%), and local government (49%). This matters because trust in institutions is eroding  - ASIO raised the terrorism threat level in 2024 partly because of declining institutional trust and politically motivated violence targeting democratic institutions.

So cultural institutions and the infrastructure supporting them represent high-trust touchpoints in a low-trust environment. That's a strategic asset for rebuilding broader social trust and civic engagement.

There are proven examples. Queensland Theatre's Traction program, working with young people in Logan after interracial violence, helped participants feel a sense of belonging "no matter their age, gender, background." The PACER program has been using visits to cultural institutions since 1989 to build student understanding and trust in government institutions, reaching 85,000 students annually. Evaluation shows it helps students "become active and informed citizens."

Why? Because participation infrastructure it might actually be essential civic infrastructure for maintaining the social fabric.

Health

One thing that keeps coming up in the literature is this relationship between cultural participation and health outcomes. This is more than arts therapy  (though those have their own strong evidence base) -  there's something deeper happening with long-term engagement.

Nordic cohort studies are particularly intriguing. They're showing associations between sustained arts participation and positive health outcomes even after controlling for the usual suspects: income, education, demographics. Which raises important questions: what's the mechanism here? Is it the social connection? The cognitive stimulation? Something about meaning-making and purpose?

The evidence seems stronger than we've typically claimed, though admittedly the causal mechanisms are still being worked out.

Why? Because if participation infrastructure is genuinely affecting health outcomes at scale, that changes the cost-benefit calculus considerably.

The Economic Development Puzzle

As Justin O'Connor has so persuasively argued in his recent book - the arts and culture as industry argument is proving problematic. But there's a part of that story that still potentially more important in relation to innovation spillovers and talent ecology. When you dig into the European data, there's this finding: each 1% increase in creative industries share correlates with 0.6% increase in GDP per capita. The interesting bit is why - it's not just about the creative sector itself, it's about knowledge spillovers, network effects, the way creative approaches migrate into other industries.

High-tech location studies are revealing too. Cultural amenities consistently rank in the top factors for business location decisions, particularly for startups and knowledge-intensive companies. Not because executives love museums (though why wouldn't they?), but because the wisdom is that, that's what attracts and retains scarce high-skill talent (I’ve got to say I think this assumption might be one that is being challenged in the systemic shifts we are experiencing but it remains - for now- a useful piece of argument).

Why? Because this suggests participation infrastructure might be economic infrastructure in a way we haven't fully articulated. Not just through direct economic impact but through its role in innovation systems and talent ecology.

Education and Capability

The education arguments feel underdeveloped in how we typically present them. Yes, arts education contributes to cognitive abilities, confidence, problem-solving, communication skills. That's established and its important. But what about what that actually means for how people move through the world? 

There's a distinction in the research between skills for passing tests versus capabilities for learning and adapting. Participation in cultural activities seems to build the platform on which wider learning happens. It's about capacity-building more than content delivery.

This connects to something else: pathways for disengaged young people. Multiple programs show cultural activities helping 12-18 year olds who've disconnected from formal education to find their way back into community, training, employment. Not necessarily through teaching them specific skills, but through helping them develop identity, purpose, connection.

Why? Because we're framing this wrong when we talk about "arts education" as if it's separate from education generally. We should be thinking about cultural participation as fundamental infrastructure for learning and development, not an optional extra.

Place and Community The

The urban regeneration narrative is messy and contested, but there are some interesting distinctions emerging. The big spectacular projects - the Guggenheims and Tate Moderns - have ambiguous effects. Gentrification, displacement, consumption, over production can be the shadow side of these initiatives.

But the evidence around small-scale, distributed cultural assets is different. Studios, small galleries, music venues, community spaces. When you look at neighbourhood-level data, cultural engagement shows correlations with things like reduced poverty without displacement, lower social stress, improved child welfare outcomes, fewer incidents of racial harassment.

The scale matters. The embeddedness matters. Whether it's organic or imposed matters.

Why? Because if we are more specific about what kind of participation infrastructure we're advocating for we see benefits - A £100 million cultural complex and a network of affordable creative spaces are both "cultural infrastructure," but they do very different things for communities.

Wellbeing

The subjective wellbeing research is substantial, and points in a consistent direction. There's clear evidence of associations between cultural participation and self-reported wellbeing, independent of socioeconomic factors.

What's interesting is that different activities seem to produce different wellbeing outcomes:  shared reading improve sense of purpose; built environment study groups enhance personal growth through knowledge acquisition; and they both improve wellbeing, but through different mechanisms.

This suggests participation infrastructure isn't a monolith. Different kinds of cultural participation meet different human needs. Which raises design questions: what mix of opportunities creates the conditions for diverse wellbeing outcomes across different populations?

Why? Because if we can demonstrate that participation infrastructure reliably contributes to wellbeing outcomes it becomes a legitimate infrastructure investment category alongside transport, utilities, and other wellbeing-supporting systems.

Innovation

The creative sector isn't just producing cultural goods; it's producing innovations that flow into the broader economy. The non-profit cultural sector essentially functions as R&D for commercial creative industries. Public funding enables risk-taking with content and ideas that then benefit the commercial sector.

Further, there's labour mobility from creative firms into other sectors, bringing approaches and ways of thinking with them. Creative industries in the supply chain driving innovation in product and process elsewhere. Urban buzz and face-to-face interactions in creative clusters generating knowledge exchange.

The places where creative industries are concentrated also show higher concentrations of high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive industries. The correlation might not be coincidental?

Why? Because participation infrastructure might be innovation infrastructure.

Justice and inclusion

There's a smaller but fascinating body of work on arts in criminal justice settings. The tricky thing is that reducing reoffending is influenced by so many variables - employment, housing, relationships - that isolating any single intervention's effect is nearly impossible.

But arts interventions show consistent impacts on something different: helping people form positive identities, build new narratives, imagine different futures. That's valuable even if it's hard to draw a direct line to reduced reoffending.

It makes me wonder about how we think about outcomes. Are we sometimes measuring the wrong things?

Why? Because if participation infrastructure helps people develop capacity for self-reflection, identity formation, and imagining alternatives, that's creating conditions for change even when the ultimate behaviour change depends on many other factors.

Questions and Tensions

A few things I'm still puzzling over:

First, the causality question runs through all of this. Does participation improve outcomes, or do people with good outcomes participate more? The longitudinal studies try to control for this, but it's genuinely difficult to establish clear causal chains in complex social systems.

Second, there's a tension between scale and embeddedness. Large-scale infrastructure can reach more people and make bigger symbolic statements. Small-scale, distributed infrastructure seems to produce better community outcomes. Can we have both? Should we prioritize one?

Third, the measurement challenge. Some of these outcomes - identity formation, capacity for reflection, sense of purpose: are real and important but difficult to quantify in ways that satisfy standard policy evaluation. How do we balance rigor with recognition of less-easily-measured but genuinely valuable outcomes?

Fourth, there's something about time. Most successful programs involve sustained engagement over weeks or months. Quick interventions don't seem to produce the depth of impact. But sustained programs are expensive and harder to scale.

So where have we landed....?

What emerges from looking across all these dimensions- from social cohesion through health, education, economic development, place-making, to innovation systems- is that participation infrastructure serves multiple functions simultaneously.

Start with social cohesion. We need spaces and programs where people can build belonging, develop trust in each other and in institutions, and practice civic engagement. Without these, the social fabric frays in ways that affect everything else.

But participation infrastructure also creates conditions for health and wellbeing -not as a side benefit, but as a core function. It supports educational development and capability building across the lifespan. It acts as part of the innovation ecosystem that drives economic adaptation and growth. It shapes how communities develop and whether that development displaces people or strengthens them.

These aren't separate benefits that happen to occur in the same spaces. They're interconnected outcomes emerging from the same fundamental dynamic: creating conditions for people to engage meaningfully with culture, with each other, and with their communities.

This is what makes participation infrastructure difficult to champion but potentially crucial. It doesn't fit neatly into traditional policy categories. Social policy? Economic policy? Health policy? Education policy? Yes to all of them, which means it often falls between departmental remits rather than being anyone's core responsibility.

But that's precisely why it matters. If we're serious about social cohesion in a fragmenting society, about wellbeing in an aging population, about capability in a changing economy, about innovation in competitive markets, about resilience in uncertain times - participation infrastructure seems to be a common thread.

The social cohesion argument feels most urgent right now because we can see and measure the decline. We know belonging is dropping, especially among young people. We know trust in institutions is eroding in ways that create security risks. We know civic engagement is struggling and there is  evidence that cultural participation contributes to rebuilding all three.

Other dimensions matter too, because they show that investing in participation infrastructure isn't just a social good - it's infrastructure that supports economic productivity, public health, educational outcomes, and urban vitality. It's not separate from "hard" infrastructure; it's complementary to it.

A place with excellent transport links, modern utilities, and fast internet, but no participation infrastructure - no libraries, no galleries, no performance spaces, no creative studios, no community cultural centers - seems like it would struggle with social cohesion, health outcomes, talent attraction, innovation, and civic engagement. Not because these things can't exist without cultural infrastructure, but because they're harder to achieve and maintain without it.

The challenge is articulating this in ways that make sense to policy makers and funders without either oversimplifying the complexity or losing sight of the evidence. We need arguments that are both rigorous and compelling, that acknowledge uncertainty while making clear what we do know.

That's the best answer I have right now to Seb's question.

Why? Because it's more than "because I care," though I do. It's because the evidence suggests this infrastructure plays essential roles in social cohesion, health, education, economic innovation, place-making, and civic function. And in a time when all of those are under pressure, maintaining and building participation infrastructure isn't optional,  it's strategic.

Still thinking this through.

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Things I drew on for this thinking

Crossick, Geoffrey, and Patrycja Kaszynska. Understanding the Value of Arts & Culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project. Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2016.

Fielding, Kate, Iva Glisic, and Jodie-Lee Trembath. Transformative: Impacts of Culture and Creativity. A New Approach and The Australian Academy of Humanities, November 2019.

O'Donnell, James, Qing Guan, and Trish Prentice. Mapping Social Cohesion – 2024. Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, November 2024.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Scanlon Foundation Research Institute. 'What Is Social Cohesion?' https://scanloninstitute.org.au/research/mapping-social-cohesion/what-social-cohesion.

Throsby, David. Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Vivian, Angela, Kate Fielding, and Sari Rossi. Transformative Edge 2024: How Arts, Culture and Creativity Impact Our Prosperity, Cohesion, Security, Health and Sustainability. A New Approach, 2024.

Vivian, Angela, Kate Fielding, and Sari Rossi. Belong, Trust, Connect: Policy Opportunities for Social Cohesion through Arts and Culture. A New Approach, 2025.

For detailed citations of specific studies referenced in the text (including work by Bakhshi, Falck, Hervas-Oliver, Salvesen & Renski, Sheppard, Stern & Seifert, and others), see the full reference lists in Crossick & Kaszynska (2016) and the A New Approach reports listed above.