Bridging Cultural Policy and Practice: Youth Cultural Agency and Ecological Imaginaries in Serbia and Slovenia

This policy brief examines how young cultural practitioners in Serbia and Slovenia engage with ecological imaginaries through artistic practice and how cultural policy shapes that work. Based on interviews, document analysis, and artistic case studies, it finds that Serbian practitioners operate amid fragmented funding, institutional precarity, and weak ecological policy integration, while Slovenian practitioners work within stronger EU-aligned frameworks that can nevertheless reduce sustainability to formal compliance. In both contexts, artistic practice generates ecological and democratic knowledge that exceeds existing policy categories. The brief calls for longer-term funding, stronger institutional autonomy, and closer dialogue between cultural policy and practice.