From cultural value to cultural capabilities: Hilary Cottam and reframing the Right to Culture

The Right to Culture has become an increasingly influential framework within cultural policy, cultural governance and participatory practice, foregrounding access and inclusion as matters of cultural rights rather than discretionary provision. Yet despite this rights-based framing, culture is understood, justified and evaluated primarily through logics of value: what culture delivers, what benefits it produces, and how its impacts may be evidenced. This critical essay argues that such value-based approaches are insufficient for realising the Right to Culture as a lived and equitable reality. Drawing on Hilary Cottam’s critique of 20th century welfare systems and her work on participatory systems in Radical Help (2018), we propose a shift from cultural value to cultural capabilities. Culture is reframed as an enabling relational infrastructure that expands people’s substantive freedoms to participate, create and belong. This shift reorients cultural rights towards the conditions that make meaningful participation possible. The essay concludes by exploring the implications of a capabilities framing for cultural policy, evaluation and practice, arguing that cultural rights must be understood in terms of what culture enables people to do and be, rather than what value it can be shown to produce.