Culture in Motion: Funding Through EEA & Norway Grants

At SIPAM, a practical session on funding became a wider conversation about trust, partnership and the future of cultural cooperation. With a new mechanism worth almost EUR 47.5 million for Romania, the EEA and Norway Grants invite artists, institutions and heritage organisations to think beyond applications and imagine collaborations that can last.

How does an artist in Bucharest end up co-producing with a partner in Oslo? Who pays for the first meeting, the travel, the rehearsal time, the research, the uncertainty, the risk? And what makes a partnership strong enough to survive after the project report has been filed? These were the questions at the centre of Culture in Motion, a special SIPAM conference dedicated to Funding Through EEA and Norway Grants, moderated by Monica Drăgan, Deputy Director of the Project Management Unit within the Ministry of Culture of Romania.

The session brought together two Donor Programme Partners from Norway: Erica Berthelsen, Senior Advisor at Arts and Culture Norway, Kulturdirektoratet, and Vegard Berggård, Senior Advisor at the Directorate for Cultural Heritage, Riksantikvaren. Their presentations offered a practical map of what can be funded, how partnerships are built and what applicants should prepare before a call opens. But the discussion also reached further. It became a conversation about why international cultural cooperation matters at a time when public budgets are under pressure, organisations are increasingly fragile and the temptation to treat funding as a short-term solution is stronger than ever.

Drăgan opened by giving the session its central image. Culture, she said, is never still. “Culture is fluid, dynamic and constantly evolving. It starts with an idea, but that idea, during the implementation of a project, will change different forms.” What transforms an idea is the encounter with other people: the partner who asks a different question, the community that needs something else than what was first imagined, the institution that has to adapt, negotiate and learn.

This, she suggested, is why the Norway Grants are such a strong example of culture in motion. Romania remains one of the beneficiary countries in which culture is still included as a programme area. “It was a struggle,” Drăgan noted, adding that “culture is always struggling to get funding.” The new mechanism, signed on 13 May, will bring a significant increase: around 40 percent more funding, almost EUR 47.5 million. The question, as Drăgan put it with visible excitement, is simple and large at once: “What can we do with that money?”

A funding mechanism built on collaboration

For Berthelsen, the first answer is collaboration. The grants are designed as a structure through which Romanian organisations can work with Norwegian partners. “The grants finance collaborations, basically,” she said. In the artistic field, this can mean co-productions, audience development, capacity-building programmes, exchanges between festivals, residencies, touring projects or new ways of working with young people. In the coming mechanism, Drăgan clarified, the cultural cooperation component will focus on Norwegian partners, a change from previous EEA frameworks that also involved Iceland and Liechtenstein.

The insistence on partnership is the core of the model. Berthelsen pointed to previous collaborations in the performing arts, including partnerships connected to the very festival context in which the discussion was taking place. The most successful examples, she said, have continued beyond the grant. “That is the beauty of the grants: when you find a partner, it can go on for a long time. You can see good friendships and collaborations going on for years and years.”

Partnership before paperwork

But finding a partner is not a box to tick at the end of an application. It begins much earlier, with clarity about what an organisation really needs and what it can offer. Berthelsen encouraged applicants to look first at their own artistic ambition and institutional needs. What do you want to develop? What kind of knowledge, network or capacity are you missing? What kind of partner could challenge you, complement you or help the project reach a different level? “Look into your own organisation and your artistic ambition,” she said, “and try to see what you want to achieve with the partnership.”

Networks help, but they are not the only route. Programme partners can support matchmaking, and the bilateral fund will allow people to travel, meet and test the chemistry of a possible collaboration. For Drăgan, this is one of the most important features of the grants. A partnership cannot be built only through polished emails and video calls. “You can talk online, but it is also important to see if you have chemistry with your partner,” she said. Since many projects last two or three years, the human relationship matters. Without shared values, a shared rhythm and a realistic understanding of how each side works, the partnership can become the very thing that weakens the project.

The bilateral fund will also support residencies, an area tested in the previous period and considered useful enough to continue. These opportunities are the ground on which stronger applications can be built. A study visit can prevent a weak partnership from becoming a funded problem. A residency can turn a vague idea into a concrete plan. A first meeting can reveal whether two institutions are genuinely interested in building something together or whether the collaboration exists only because a guideline rewards it.

Heritage, use and community

The heritage component brings a different but closely related logic. Berggård explained that, in heritage projects, a Norwegian partner may not always be obligatory in the same way as in artistic projects, but a strong partnership can bring additional value and, often, extra points in the evaluation. The role of the Norwegian partner is usually less about taking over the restoration budget and more about content, interpretation and use. “Often there is a restoration of a building and you fill that building with content,” he said. The partner may contribute through craftsmanship training, heritage interpretation, work with local communities or models of sustainable use.

For Berggård, the value of the outside partner lies partly in the questions they ask. After two decades of working with this kind of cooperation, the feedback from both Romanian and Norwegian participants has been consistent: a good partner improves the quality of a project. “It is very useful to have someone coming in from the outside and asking questions that you haven’t even considered yet,” he said. The benefit moves both ways. Norwegian institutions also learn from Romanian partners, from different histories of place, different craft traditions and different ways of involving people in heritage.

What makes an application credible

The discussion repeatedly returned to the same principle: good projects are not invented by copying the language of a call. They begin with a real idea and a real need. Berthelsen was direct about this. “Start early,” she advised. Applicants should not develop a concept alone and then send it to a partner for approval. They should discuss the project together from the beginning, meet as often as possible and communicate regularly. They should also talk about money very early. In the arts, she acknowledged, people may not always want to begin with budgets. But they have to. “Maybe even the first meeting should be about the economy,” she said.

This transparency is not only administrative hygiene; it prevents conflict during implementation. Drăgan added that Romanian applicants must remember that a Norwegian partner may not understand local bureaucracy, institutional habits or the practical constraints of working in Romania. Those realities need to be explained. At the same time, partners deserve a fair portion of the budget if they are expected to contribute meaningfully. A partnership cannot be sincere if one side is treated as symbolic.

Berggård offered another piece of practical advice: build the application around a concrete list of joint activities and a realistic budget. In cross-border work, assumptions are dangerous. Partners often believe they understand the same words in the same way, only to discover too late that expectations differ. “You should ask more questions, rather than fewer,” he said. Misunderstandings are easy when institutions come from different administrative cultures, different funding systems and different working traditions.

The most common mistakes, the speakers suggested, are visible in applications where the partnership is weak, the budget does not match the narrative or the implementation plan has not been thought through. If a partner has not been involved from the early stages, if the relationship is not mutual, or if the Norwegian side is present only to satisfy a condition, evaluators can usually see it.

Drăgan was equally clear. A strong application must show how the idea will become practical. “You have to start thinking from the beginning at the implementation,” she said. Beautiful language is not enough, and neither is an application that borrows the vocabulary of the guidelines without a convincing plan behind it. The budget, activities and indicators must speak to one another. If a seminar is proposed, who is it for? How will people be reached? How will the applicant prove that it served the community or changed something? Evaluators can tell when the project has been built carefully and when it has been assembled to tick boxes.

Several examples showed how broad that necessity can be. Berthelsen mentioned performing arts projects focused on developing new leaders for theatre, including young curators, producers and directors; projects involving venues, ensembles and touring; collaborations dedicated to young audiences; and exchanges between festivals, including a Romanian-Norwegian cooperation around metal festivals, staff exchange and artistic programming. These examples point to the elasticity of the grants: they can support artistic creation, organisational learning, audience development and festival capacity, as long as the partnership is meaningful and the objectives are credible.

Berggård, meanwhile, stressed that heritage projects cannot stop at restoration. Across the heritage field, he said, there is a movement toward preserving heritage through use. A restored building should not become a frozen object, beautiful but disconnected from the life around it. The best projects involve local communities not only as audiences, but as people who help shape what happens there. He gave the example of a fishing community in Portugal, where a project brought together the museum, crafts associations, active fishermen and local residents. Because the community recognised its own stories, tools and memories in the project, it gained ownership. That ownership made the work more sustainable.

This point was echoed by Demeter András István, the Romanian Ministry of Culture, who’s remarks during the session placed cultural funding in a wider social context. Culture, the discussion suggested, touches every sector: education, inclusion, community development, mental health, gender issues, Roma communities, local economies and civic life. Drăgan mentioned projects in which artistic activities supported vulnerable groups and helped people express experiences that could not easily be captured in institutional language. The grants can therefore become a space where culture is treated as a way of working with society itself.

Innovation, in this context, does not necessarily mean technology or novelty for its own sake. It can mean putting unexpected partners in the same room. Drăgan recalled an initiative that connected open-air museums with festivals, groups that may not have imagined working together at first. 

Beyond the grant line

Sustainability was another recurring word, but it was used in a practical sense. For Berthelsen, partnerships continue when the people involved remain open to learning from one another and to discovering value that was not visible at the beginning. For Berggård, the most honest way to build a durable partnership is to focus on the quality of the project itself. If the work is meaningful, partners will want to find new ideas and new funding after the grant ends. Drăgan added that cultural organisations should also think entrepreneurially and design projects that can continue generating value after the grant period ends.

Toward the end of the session, the conversation turned to the future. What should this kind of funding make possible in 20 or 30 years? Berggård answered from the heritage perspective: he hopes old buildings will be seen as a resource rather than an expense, part of the green transition, social inclusion and local identity. Berthelsen answered from the artistic side with deliberately large words, as she put it: art can contribute to a better society, democracy and freedom of speech. The grants alone cannot achieve this, but they can help.

Drăgan’s hope was equally ambitious: that culture will no longer have to fight for recognition from the margins. “Without culture, we are not whole as a person,” she said. The ambition is for culture to be understood as a first priority, not a last one, because it shapes how people imagine, belong, remember and act together. The Minister of Culture’s remarks added a simple challenge to the room: to have the courage to dream, and to use available financing as a way to imagine the future of places, communities and artistic lives.

What comes next

The practical next steps are still ahead. The programme is under negotiation, and the Ministry of Culture will gather input from the sector through a questionnaire on needs and priorities before calls are launched next year. Applicants were encouraged to follow official updates and begin preparing early: identifying real needs, looking for partners, discussing budgets, testing ideas and thinking about implementation from day one.