Manifesto
The Rise of Cultural Asset Governance
Across the world, institutions hold highly valuable, often vast, cultural assets that exist within museums, banks, corporations, universities, and public institutions. Collectively, they represent significant cultural, financial, and reputational value, yet despite their importance, these assets have not historically been managed as institutional assets, but rather as collections.
The Cultural Asset Governance Initiative aims to change that.
Adam Custer, Unsplash
Why Now?
Three forces are driving this shift:
1. Scale and Distribution
Collections are no longer centralised, but are increasingly distributed across offices, storage facilities, and geographies.
2. Risk and Compliance
Institutions face increasing scrutiny around asset oversight, insurance, and fiduciary responsibility.
3. Digital Transformation
Every major asset class now has supporting infrastructure. Cultural assets remain one of the last without it.
This combination makes the current model unsustainable and in dire need of development. Without structured governance, institutions face incomplete or unreliable records, loss of visibility and control, increased operational and financial risk, underutilised cultural assets, and inability to respond to institutional or regulatory demands
The issue is not whether governance will be required. It's when.
Defining Cultural Asset Governance
Cultural Asset Governance is the structured management, documentation, safeguarding, and activation of cultural assets within an institutional framework of accountability and oversight.
This definition is intentionally practical. It does not replace curatorial expertise, but complements it.
Governance provides the structure through which cultural stewardship can operate at institutional scale.
Maksym Tymchyk, Unsplash
The Role of Frameworks and Standards
For this discipline to mature, institutions require:
• A shared language
• A clear framework
• Measurable standards
• A way to assess progress
Without these, governance remains abstract. With them, it becomes implementable.
The Emergence of Infrastructure
Every institutional asset class evolves in the same way: informal management, standardisation, systemisation, and strategic integration.
Cultural assets are now entering this cycle, which is creating the need for digital infrastructure that can support governance at scale.
This isn't just a record-keeping tool, but a system for accountability, visibility, control, and activation.
What Happens Next
As Cultural Asset Governance becomes more widely adopted, institutions will begin to assess their current level of governance, enabling target maturity levels to be defined, structured systems and processes to be implemented, internal expertise and roles to be developed, and cultural assets to be integrated into broader institutional strategy.
A new professional language will emerge as a result. Statements such as “we need to improve our governance maturity" and “we are implementing a governance framework” will become standard.
Paul Z, Unsplash
The Structural Gap
In most institutions, cultural assets exist outside formal governance systems.
They are documented inconsistently, managed across fragmented tools, overseen without clear accountability, and can be difficult to access or report on.
This is not due to neglect but rather a structural gap.
These assets have traditionally been shaped and managed by curatorial practice rather than institutional governance. However, the environment around them has changed immensely alongside the development of technology, and governance needs to adapt and grow with it.
The Shift Is Already Underway
Institutions today face increasing expectations of accountability, transparency, and control.
Boards, auditors, insurers, and stakeholders now expect stringent record-keeping measures, such as accurate asset records, clear ownership and responsibility, movement and location visibility, and overall alignment with risk and insurance frameworks - expectations that already apply to financial assets, real estate portfolios, and intellectual property.
Cultural assets are no longer exempt.
A New Category Emerges
This increase in expectation created the need for a new institutional discipline:
Cultural Asset Governance
Cultural Asset Governance establishes the structures, standards, and systems needed to manage these assets with the same level of rigor applied to other institutional assets.
It represents a much-needed transition: from collections to governed assets; from informal management to institutional accountability; from static holdings to active, strategic resources.
The Five Requirements of Governance
For cultural assets to be governed effectively, institutions must be able to:
1. Document
Maintain complete, structured, and current records
2. Govern
Define ownership, accountability, and policy
3. Safeguard
Track, protect, and manage risk
4. Enable Access
Provide controlled and structured visibility
5. Activate
Most institutions are not starting from zero. They are starting from fragmentation. Some have partial systems. Others have strong curatorial practices but limited infrastructure. Many have visibility gaps across locations and departments. What is missing is not intent.
The framework of Cultural Asset Governance provides a structured model for governance, enabling consistency and limiting this fragmentation.
Maria Krasnova, Unsplash
The Inevitable Outcome
Cultural Asset Governance will become a standard institutional function.
Just as financial controls, property management, and IT governance are now embedded within institutional operations, cultural assets will be governed through structured systems, standards, and practices.
The institutions that move early will gain greater control and reduced risk, improved operational efficiency, stronger cultural and reputational impact, and the ability to activate their collections strategically. Those that delay will face increasing pressure to adapt.
This is not a marginal shift. It is the formalisation of an entire category.
Cultural assets are no longer peripheral but institutional, and institutions need to begin the shift to govern them accordingly.
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