County Administrative Emergency Call: "One would have protested already fifteen years ago"

The county museums have reached a limit to how much their economies can be eroded. That struck the museums' cooperation council as early as May, and now they have gathered again, in one last joint emergency call.

The cultural journalist Anders Rydell works for Svenska Dagbladet and has followed the issue for a long time, not least as a former cultural director at the Hallpressen newspaper in Jönköping.

- Now you have probably reached a breaking point where it is difficult to get the business to function at all. When you visit different county museums around the country you see that many are almost like empty houses. There is simply not that much staff.

It is the state that provides the county museums with a financial contribution to conduct their operations, but during the last twenty years, the enumeration, ie the annual increase in relation to inflation, has not kept pace with the museums' salary increases and maintenance costs.

According to the Swedish Agency for Cultural Analysis, Sweden's county museums have been forced to terminate almost one in ten employees during the period 2003 to 2017. According to the county museums' own survey, the situation will deteriorate further in 2020. More than every third county museum will reduce the number of employees next year.

"It's a bit on the hair, these protests would have been ten, fifteen years ago already," says Anders Rydell.

Several county museums also testify that the so-called Cultural Collaboration Model - which was introduced in 2011 and which gives the regions more power to distribute the state cultural money they want - is one of the factors that has helped the museums receive less and less money.

- This has meant that institutions that previously had a natural part of this money have been forced to compete with lots of other local players who want a part of the money bag, and where the county museums have had a harder time asserting, says Anders Rydell.

So far, the response from the Ministry of Culture has been pending. Culture Minister Amanda Lind has said that she does not rule out the need for more money for regional culture, but that it is a matter for the government's ongoing budget work - and she does not want to comment.

- I think it is dangerous to dismantle local activities that protect the cultural heritage at a time when there are political movements that are ready to exploit the cultural heritage for political purposes, says Anders Rydell.