Measuring what matters

Culture increasingly sits at the centre of economic diversification, innovation, and resilience. Yet public investment continues to be assessed largely through narrow indicators such as visitor numbers or short-term GDP effects. These metrics capture immediate outputs but overlook the broader economic, social, environmental, and institutional value that culture generates over time.

Our recent work in  Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (Nature Portfolio) and the World Economic Forum argues that cultural institutions are not simply repositories of heritage or symbolic assets but forms of economic and social infrastructure. Like transport, education, or research systems, they require sustained investment while generating returns that accumulate across sectors, generations, and places.

This perspective reframes culture as a form of patient capital, producing long-term culture dividends through stronger human capabilities, innovation, social cohesion, environmental stewardship, and economic resilience. The policy challenge is therefore less about demonstrating that culture creates value than about developing measurement systems capable of recognising it.

This challenge becomes even more important as governments adopt anticipatory and AI-enabled models of governance, where decisions increasingly depend on sophisticated data but still require human judgement about what societies value. Artificial intelligence can expand access to information, but it cannot determine which outcomes societies should value or prioritise.

Culture as infrastructure in practice

This broader understanding of culture is already shaping policy in several jurisdictions.

Abu Dhabi provides one example. Over the past decade, the emirate has positioned culture alongside sectors such as energy, finance, tourism, and technology within its long-term diversification strategy. Investments in museums, heritage, creative industries, public art, and Cultural-Tech initiatives have been accompanied by efforts to strengthen data systems and anticipatory governance, recognising that cultural infrastructure contributes to much more than visitor economies.

Similar patterns can be observed elsewhere. Barcelona's investment in cultural heritage has generated long-term benefits for employment, tourism, and urban regeneration. Singapore has integrated museums, heritage, creative industries, and cultural districts into its wider innovation and talent strategy.

Although each context differs, they illustrate a common principle: cultural infrastructure creates value when it is connected to broader economic and social systems rather than treated as an isolated policy domain.

Museums and heritage as long-term infrastructure

Museums represent one of the most visible components of cultural infrastructure. They support skilled employment, education, tourism, research, creative industries, and urban development while embedding economic activity locally. Like other forms of infrastructure, museums require significant upfront investment while generating public returns over decades.

Heritage ecosystems extend this logic beyond institutions to encompass landscapes, traditional knowledge, craftsmanship, and cultural practices. Evidence from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and East and Southeast Asia demonstrates how these systems strengthen local livelihoods while contributing to climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and regenerative development. Because these benefits are diffuse, preventative, and often indirect, they remain poorly reflected in conventional economic statistics.

Why measurement matters

The central challenge is therefore one of measurement rather than value creation.

Traditional accounting frameworks capture only a fraction of culture's contribution to economic performance. Broader indicator systems -including cultural participation, knowledge spillovers, environmental performance, social entrepreneurship, institutional continuity, and ecosystem vitality - provide a more complete picture of how culture contributes to resilience and sustainable development, while strengthening the evidence base for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) decision-making.

This becomes increasingly important in the age of AI. Predictive models can identify patterns, forecast risks, and optimise service delivery, but they cannot determine what should be preserved, prioritised, or transformed. Better cultural indicators therefore do more than improve evidence: they strengthen governments' capacity to exercise informed judgement by connecting information with the social, cultural, and institutional contexts in which policy decisions are made.

International organisations are increasingly advancing this agenda. The 2025 UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics introduces a renewed approach centred on Cultural and Creative Ecosystems and the interaction between economic, natural, human, and social capital. The OECD continues developing guidance that helps governments assess the contribution of cultural ecosystems to innovation, entrepreneurship, and evolving business models, while WIPO's Creative Economy Data Program strengthens international approaches to measuring creative economies.

Policy lessons

Taken together, these developments suggest several practical policy  lessons :

• • treat cultural infrastructure as economic infrastructure;
  • connect cultural investment to youth and future human capabilities;
  • catalyse creative business ecosystems through major cultural assets;
  • use robust data and forward-looking governance to leverage AI to support investment decisions and evaluate long-term impact; and
  • adopt broader measurement frameworks that recognise culture's long-term economic, social, environmental, and institutional contributions.

These lessons point to a practical conclusion: culture policy should no longer sit at the margins of economic strategy. When cultural assets are connected to skills, enterprise, tourism, technology and urban development, they can become engines of opportunity across the wider economy.