A Culture Strategy for Scotland: Action Plan

Ministerial foreword

Christina McKelvie, Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development

Scotland’s culture is world famous. From the Borders to Shetland, our extraordinary creative organisations, practitioners and passionate communities come together to create truly remarkable work, which we know has a real impact on the whole country’s social and economic wellbeing. As a Government, we take great pride in the country’s culture, and we recognise the need to nurture it for the benefit of future generations.

This new Action Plan presents a series of workstreams that, collectively, aim to provide a roadmap to a strong, resilient culture sector, and support a cultural landscape where everyone benefits and gets to take part.

The Action Plan builds on the vision for culture that we set out in early 2020, when we published our Culture Strategy for Scotland. The Culture Strategy built on years of conversation and consultation across the cultural and creative sectors, public bodies, audiences, participants, academic institutions, and more. Centred around three key themes of strengthening, transforming and empowering, the Culture Strategy set out a clear vision for culture in Scotland. It made it clear we believe culture is for everybody, and our mission as a Government is to create the conditions for it to thrive, to ensure every person in Scotland has the chance to experience the life-changing potential of participating in cultural and creative activity.

We know that culture can make us happier, healthier and more prosperous, and this Action Plan aims to create the conditions to allow culture to deliver all these outputs and more – for the benefit of everyone.