Project-Based Management in Arts and Cultural Programs: Emerging Practices for Sustainable Program Delivery

Abstract

Arts and cultural organizations have increasingly adopted the language and tools of project management to plan, fund, and deliver their work, yet the fit between mainstream project management doctrine and the emergent, multi-stakeholder nature of cultural production remains uneasy. This article synthesizes research spanning cultural animation, sustainable development planning, and organizational studies to examine how project-based management — both predictive and adaptive approaches — is being adapted to the realities of arts and cultural programming. It argues that sustainable program delivery depends less on the wholesale import of standard project frameworks than on their selective translation: loosening rigid scope assumptions, treating sustainability as a structural design parameter rather than an afterthought, building transdisciplinary teams, and constructing programme-level infrastructure that allows learning to accumulate across successive project cycles. Drawing on case evidence from cultural animation projects, festival design, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, the article proposes a working framework of emerging practices and identifies the organizational and evidentiary gaps that remain, particularly for smaller, community-based cultural organizations operating with limited resources. The discussion concludes that the tension between project logic and cultural value is unlikely to be resolved outright, but that organizations which manage this tension deliberately are best positioned to sustain high-quality, socially embedded program delivery over time.