Not a Toolkit! Fair Collaboration in Cultural Relations: a reflAction

This resource was commissioned by EUNIC — the European network of national cultural institutes — following an open call in 2021, and developed by six practitioners and researchers through extensive consultation with cultural relations professionals worldwide. Rather than offering a step-by-step manual, it invites reflection and honest self-examination. 

The resource is structured as eight interconnected components, none of which need to be read in sequence. A Provocation Paper opens up the discomfort around fairness in cultural partnerships — naming the gap between institutional rhetoric and lived experience. A Critical Glossary builds shared understanding of terms that practitioners often use without agreeing on their meaning. The Ways of... texts explore specific dimensions of fairness in practice: decolonisation, the climate emergency, intersectionality, and evaluation.

Two tools are designed for active use rather than reading: the Fairness Checker guides a team through the full project management cycle with fairness as the lens, and the Fair ReflAction Game uses real-life scenarios to surface the moments where unfairness enters a collaboration — often before anyone has named it. An Organisational Wheel of Fairness supports longer-term strategic conversations about institutional change. All components are freely downloadable as PDFs.

• For participants in Building Strong International Partnerships, the Fairness Checker and Fair ReflAction Game are the most immediately applicable: both can be used at the preparation stage of a new partnership to surface assumptions, clarify power dynamics, and set shared expectations before a collaboration begins. The Critical Glossary is useful for any team where partners come from different institutional contexts and may attach different meanings to the same words.
• For Climate-Forward Culture: Practical Sustainability, the Ways of... section on climate emergency is worth reading independently — it situates the environmental agenda within a broader justice framework rather than treating it as a technical problem, which extends the conversation that webinar opens.

Authors: Cristina Farinha, Avril Joffe, Matina Magkou, Anna Steinkamp, Katelijn Verstraete, Sudebi Thakurata | Published by: EUNIC | Year: 2021