Submission Deadline: 01 June 2027
Guest editor for the Special Issue
Wen-Ling Lin
Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Arts Management and Cultural Policy, National Taiwan University of Arts
Yunci Cai
Associate Professor in Museum and Heritage Studies, School of Heritage and Culture, University of Leicester
Increasingly, museum policy and governance have become entangled with politics. Across both democratic and authoritarian contexts, museums are often expected to reinforce certain historical narratives, promote national identity, and reflect prevailing political agendas. A prominent example is the policy changes introduced following U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, when executive orders led many museums to discontinue long-standing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. More broadly, inconsistencies in cultural policy and opaque decision-making processes frequently leave museums struggling to adapt. Rather than developing long-term institutional strategies, museums often find themselves responding to shifting political priorities and changing performance indicators (KPIs), limiting their capacity for sustainable planning and independent development. Together, these political and administrative pressures can constrain institutional autonomy, encourage self-censorship and narrow museums’ ability to engage critically with complex social and historical issues.
As permanent, non-profit institutions, museums often depend on public funding, making them vulnerable to political influence over institutional priorities and decision-making. At the same time, declining public investment and growing pressures to generate their own revenues have encouraged many museums to adopt increasingly commercial approaches, potentially compromising their public mission and social responsibilities. Meanwhile, museum professionals are expected to manage increasingly complex organizations despite limited resources, precarious employment conditions, and relatively low pay. The growing burden of responsibility and emotional labour places considerable strain on museum staff, diminishing their wellbeing, creativity, and capacity for innovation, while posing significant challenges to the long-term sustainability of the museum workforce.
These intersecting political, financial, and organizational pressures call for a fundamental rethinking of museum governance and cultural policy. Rather than relying on top-down models of control, there is a growing need for more collaborative, accountable, and dialogic approaches to cultural governance that support institutional resilience, professional autonomy, and meaningful public engagement.
Rethinking museum governance also requires attention to the internal dynamics of museums as organizations. Effective leadership and management should work in tandem to support institutional transformation and innovation while navigating the complexities of day-to-day operations. Although museums exist to serve the public, this “public” is often treated as an abstract or idealized audience rather than a diverse and evolving set of communities. In practice, audience research in many museums remains limited to visitor satisfaction surveys designed primarily to meet government performance indicators (KPIs), rather than generating meaningful evidence to inform institutional decision-making and public engagement.
Museums can strengthen their capacity for responsive and inclusive decision-making by adopting evidence-informed management. Drawing on organizational theory, marketing and branding research, impact assessment, and other management approaches enables museums to make decisions grounded in evidence rather than assumptions, challenging entrenched ways of thinking and better addressing the needs of diverse audiences and communities.
At the same time, organizational culture must evolve through more participatory and reflective forms of practice. This involves critically examining how decisions are made, whose voices are represented, and how institutional authority can be shared. New forms of partnership with organizations, communities, and individuals can foster collaboration, co-creation, and mutual learning, enabling museums to pursue shared social goals while strengthening their public value. Through these action-oriented and participatory approaches, museums can work alongside communities to advance social justice and reinforce their role as responsive, ethical, and socially engaged cultural institutions.
This special issue explores how museums can become more inclusive, participatory, and action-oriented by rethinking the relationship between cultural policy, governance, leadership, and management. We invite contributions from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including critical museum studies, management and organization studies, cultural policy, heritage studies, and related fields, that critically examine museum policies, governance, discourse, leadership, management, case studies, and professional practice.
Suggested Topics:
We particularly welcome submissions addressing the following themes, although contributions are not limited to these topics:
- Museums, politics, and cultural governance: The entanglement of museum governance with political agendas, including questions of institutional autonomy, state influence, and the politicization of historical narratives and cultural policy.
- Policy instability, funding regimes, and institutional sustainability: The effects of shifting cultural policies, fragmented governance, and changing funding models on museums’ long-term planning, organizational resilience, and public mission.
- Commercialization and the transformation of museum practice: The growing influence of market logics, revenue generation, and branding on museum missions, public value, and relationships with audiences and communities.
- Museum work, precarity, and organizational labour: The conditions of museum labour, including workload pressures, emotional labour, and employment precarity, and their implications for workforce sustainability and professional practice.
- Evidence, audiences, and decision-making in museums: Approaches to museum governance based on evidence-informed management, including critiques of KPI-driven cultures, audience research practices, and the construction of the “public”.
- Participation, leadership, and new governance models: Emerging approaches to organizational change, including distributed leadership, participatory governance, co-creation, shared authority, and collaborative relationships with communities and stakeholders.
- Re-evaluation of museum value and impact: Examining the role of museums as sites for promoting social justice, supporting activism and advancing cultural equity and social inclusion, with a focus on how museum policies, legislation, assessment and evaluation frameworks can strengthen their public value and impact.
Submission Guidelines
Academic Research Papers submissions of 5,000-10,000 words in English and 12,000-20,000 words in Chinese) with the Authors Profile submission form for CPME (please refer to the journal website http://cpme.tacps.tw) should be emailed, as Microsoft Word attachments, to T3CPME at cpme@tacps.tw by 1st June 2027 in CMS Style. All research articles will go through a double-blind peer review procedure. The Special Issue is planned to be published in May 2028.
Book Reviews, Art Critiques, Curating Critiques, Policy Reviews (between 1,000 to 1,500 words in English) & Case Reports or Forum Notes (within 3,000 words in English) related to the current theme of “Toward Responsive Museum Governance: Policy, Leadership, and Management” will also be welcome. All review articles and case reports will be evaluated internally by the CPME Editorial Board.
CPME is a high quality, open access, peer-reviewed Chinese and English languages journal published dually online and in print by Taiwan Association of Cultural Policy Study (TACPS) every May and November. The journal follows the standard for Ethics and Publication Malpractice set by the COPE.