Public Diplomacy’s Missing Question: Who Gets to Decide?

Imagine a publicly funded international arts festival. The performances sell out, diplomats attend and organizers call it a public diplomacy success. Yet the artists invited from the host community were never asked what the festival should be about. They could participate, but not change the plan. That distinction matters: cultural participation is not the same as cultural authority. If public diplomacy is meant to build relationships with foreign publics rather than merely project an attractive national image, who gets to make decisions is as important as who appears onstage.

An ambitious program can still reproduce an uneven relationship. One institution writes the brief, controls the budget and approves the message, while another supplies local talent and access to audiences. This is not an accusation against every embassy or cultural institute. It is a design risk whenever consultation is mistaken for a genuine partnership. An event may be artistically excellent and diplomatically limited at the same time.

Policy language already recognizes the issue. The European Union’s 2016 strategy for international cultural relations calls for reciprocity, mutual learning and co-creation rather than one-way projection. UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions places freedom of expression among the conditions for protecting cultural diversity. The European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) offers a Fairness Checker for Managing Collaboration Projects through its Not a toolkit! resource. The remaining test is straightforward: which decisions can local partners actually influence?

Consider Kibera Fashion Week in Nairobi, supported through the EU’s European Spaces of Culture initiative. The European External Action Service described a project that sought to let local perspectives shape how sustainability is defined, rather than assuming that solutions should begin with secondhand clothes from Europe. Community co-ownership was presented as a goal. The published account does not show who controlled the budget or could change final decisions, so it cannot establish that the goal was achieved. It does, however, pose a useful question: What changes when local creators help determine the premise rather than merely provide the content?

The U.S. State Department’s OneBeat music exchange offers another model. Musicians jointly create original work instead of performing a predetermined national repertoire. Its alumni accelerator has funded locally initiated projects after the exchange. In a 2024 announcement, the department reported more than 50 grants since the program began in 2018. That is evidence of continued opportunities for participants, not proof that the exchanges changed public attitudes. It shows that public diplomacy funding can leave room for participants to initiate rather than just deliver.

"Artists are valuable to public diplomacy partly because they are not diplomats. They can ask questions official representatives cannot easily ask and express the contradictions that polished national narratives tend to erase. "

There are three rights worth building into every partnership.

First, the right to propose. If a call invites local partners only after the theme, cast and venue have been chosen, it offers participation, not shared authorship. Embassies, foundations and cultural institutes could fund a short design phase before announcing a program, with paid local representatives involved in choosing its subjects, artists and format. Consultation should leave a record of decisions changed, not merely meetings held.

Second, the right to disagree. A funder may legitimately identify objectives and legal boundaries. It should not demand that an artist affirm a government’s preferred narrative as the price of inclusion. Disagreement need not be provocation; sometimes it takes the form of a difficult historical question, a conflicting memory or a refusal to simplify a culture for an overseas audience. UNESCO’s research on artistic freedom emphasizes that freedom of expression and the material conditions of creative work belong together. Credibility is weakened when artistic independence exists only until it becomes inconvenient.

Third, the right to benefit. The distribution of authority is also written into contracts: fees, recordings, translation rights, attribution, touring permissions and access to future opportunities. The same UNESCO analysis identifies fair remuneration and social protection as persistent challenges for artists. A project that celebrates equal partnership while leaving the local institution without rights over the work it helped create has confused visibility with equity.

It is important to measure decisions, not just attendance. This argument does not require replacing audience statistics with a speculative index of trust. Public diplomacy managers could retain attendance and media figures while asking three additional questions: Who could change the original brief? Which consequential decisions were made jointly? What resources and rights remained with local partners? Budgets, agreements and meeting records can help answer those questions. Asking each partner separately would reveal more about the quality of cooperation than a shared press release.

Sharing authority involves costs. Negotiations take longer, disagreements become more visible and sponsors relinquish some control. Those are legitimate concerns, especially for publicly accountable institutions. The answer is not to abandon strategic objectives, but to state them clearly, agree on nonnegotiable legal and safeguarding conditions, then protect genuine artistic discretion within those boundaries.

Artists are valuable to public diplomacy partly because they are not diplomats. They can ask questions official representatives cannot easily ask and express the contradictions that polished national narratives tend to erase. When their independence becomes decorative, cultural exchange risks becoming another communications campaign. The next time a program is praised for building bridges, public diplomats should ask a less comfortable question: Who was allowed to decide where the bridge would lead?