Mémoire
| Résumé : | Creative Europe is the European Commission only Programme catered to the Cultural and Creative Sector. Starting out with a budget of 1,4b euros in the framework of the 2014-2020 MFF, the Programme received an increase in budget in 2018 up to 1,64b, in light of its positive mid-term evaluation. However, in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the European Commission proposed a decrease in Creative Europe’s funding, who got assigned a budget of 1,52b (May 2020). This led to the uprising of numerous advocacy actors, among which Culture Action Europe, one of the main “networks of networks” implicated in the EU cultural field. Following the advocacy mobilization, in November 2020, the budget finally got brought back to 2.2b and Creative Europe got inscribed among the Flagship Programs of the Recovery Fund. This thesis aims at shedding light on what ensured this policy continuity. To do so, this thesis explores the impact of past discourse on policy continuity. In particular, it aims at observing how Culture Action Europe (CAE)’s advocacy discourse was able to instrumentalize the past integration of its discourse to construct a post-proposal advocacy that would narrow down policy options, thus ensuring policy continuity.Through a discursive institutionalism approach, this thesis presents a critical discourse analysis of three bodies of texts: first, Culture Action Europe’s 2017 mid-term evaluation of Creative Europe that will shed light on the baseline discourse of the advocacy actor. Then a discursive comparison between the 2013 Regulation establishing Creative Europe and the Proposal for its amendment in 2018; this will reveal if CAE’s discourse was successfully integrated. Lastly, the analysis will tackle CAE’s official online publications from May 2020 to November 2020; this last section will explore the so-called lock-in effect, meaning a discursive process through which an advocacy actor instrumentalizes previous discursive successes to narrow down policy options in a following discourse, thus ensuring policy continuity. |
