The study investigates how organization and governance models shape museums’ behaviour. It show that the Italian Reform of museums, granting organizational and financial autonomy to selected museums, has provided effective incentives to secure competitive international funding (such as EU grants), revealing a crucial learning effect and guiding future policy.
Museums today are far more than just repositories of heritage; they are recognized as essential drivers of economic development, social cohesion, and local culture. Their mission has evolved worldwide, as reflected in the new definition adopted in 2022 by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which emphasizes the role of museums as agents of societal change, centered on inclusivity, sustainability, and ethics.
Fulfilling these expanding responsibilities, however, requires adequate and diverse funding sources. In an era of increasing pressure on public budget – exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic (ICOM-IMREC, 2025) – museum’s ability to secure additional funds is vital.
Our study focuses on a previously neglected area of museum behaviour: their capacity to participate in and effectively secure funding through competitive international procedures, such as the EU Cohesion Policy. Successfully accessing these resources is rarely a matter of chance; rather, it reflects a museum’s institutional responsiveness, deeply rooted in its governance framework.
Indeed, the link between governance and performance is a cornerstone of cultural economics, as management models profoundly affect a museum’s operational effectiveness. In this regard, Bertacchini et al. (2018) provided empirical evidence that private and autonomous public museums consistently outperform traditional, non-autonomous institutions in terms of accessibility and local impact. Similarly, Leva et al. (2019) confirmed that autonomy is the decisive factor for enhancing service provision within the state-owned sector.
Italy provides a unique setting for this analysis, particularly following the 2014 Reform (Franceschini Reform), which granted scientific, financial, accounting, and organizational autonomy to a selected group of state museums. We set out to investigate if this reform, aimed at creating a new set of incentives, had a concrete impact on the ability of these institutions to attract external resources.
Our initial analysis identifies the characteristics that shape an institution’s ability to secure funding. We find that governance features play a critical role:
- Being publicly owned significantly increases the probability of engaging in projects compared to private museums, and this probability rises further if the institution is owned by the central government. Most importantly, for state museums, possessing autonomy further increases the likelihood of securing projects by a substantial margin, underscoring the relevance of the governance framework.
- Larger institutions – which we proxy by the number of employees and surface area – are more likely to secure project funding, although with smaller marginal effects compared to governance features. Furthermore, the presence of a director is positively associated with project involvement.
- The external environment plays a crucial role: museums located in areas with a stronger local cultural and tourism ecosystem – characterized by a high density of hospitality structures and other museums – have a greater likelihood of participating in competitive calls. This finding points to the benefits of creating synergies between the cultural and economic sectors.
The most insightful finding comes from our deep dive into the causal impact of the reform on state museums that were gradually granted autonomy. The reform’s design – which assigned the “autonomy treatment” to different groups of museums (cohorts) at different times over several years – allowed us to treat this rollout as a “natural experiment.” This staggered approach, where some museums gained autonomy early and others later, enabled us to make a crucial comparison regarding the reform’s impact.
Since the groups receiving autonomy were not randomly selected – they often started out with different characteristics, like size or location – we applied a statistical technique based on Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) that ensures a fair comparison.
Findings revealed that the reform had a positive and growing impact on a museum’s success in obtaining competitive funding. Our results confirm the validity of our approach and, crucially, show that the average effect of autonomy on the treated museums (ATET) is positive and increases over time (Figure 1). This suggests a “learning-by-doing” effect: as museums gain more exposure to the treatment, they become increasingly capable of securing competitive funding. This proactive behavior is consistent with the theoretical framework of career concerns: autonomous museum managers, who do not enjoy tenure, are incentivized to enhance their reputation, and successfully securing competitive funds is a powerful indicator of professional competence and innovative attitude.
However, we also observed that the selection process was not neutral. Museums that gained autonomy early (2015 cohort) showed stronger and more immediate positive effects than those granted it later (2017 cohort). This disparity highlights that staggered implementation created challenges, as later cohorts had to compete against institutions that had already developed superior organizational capacity under the new regime.
Our findings offer critical guidance for cultural policymakers:
- Governance models profoundly shape proactive museum behavior. Autonomy is an effective mechanism for promoting long-term financial sustainability.
- While autonomy is effective, its implementation must be carefully managed. The fact that the process for granting autonomy was not transparent, lacking clear, pre-stated criteria, suggests that a deeper examination of the factors behind the selection process is necessary.
- To ensure that all autonomous museums have an equal opportunity to thrive, policymakers should address the disparities arising from the staggered rollout through targeted policy measures, such as capacity-building initiatives and training for later cohorts.
- Financial incentives must be aligned with the broader mission of cultural institutions. As Peacock & Rizzo (2008) argue, governance must ensure that personal reputation concerns do not overshadow the museum’s broader mission. Autonomy must be accompanied by measurable objectives that align management actions with public cultural policy.
Figure 1 – Duration of exposure
References
Bertacchini, E., Dalle Nogare, C, & Scuderi, R. (2018). Ownership, organization structure and public service provision: the case of museums. Journal of Cultural Economics 42(4): 619–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-018-9321-9
Callaway, B., & Sant’Anna, P. H. (2021). Difference-in-differences with multiple time periods. Journal of Econometrics, 225(2), 200-230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2020.12.001
ICOM-IMREC. (2025). Decrease in public funding? A worldwide answer from Museums https://icom.museum/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IRAPFM-FINAL_7fev_2025-1.pdf
Leva, L., Menicucci, V., Roma, G., & Ruggeri, D. (2019). Innovazioni nella governance dei musei statali e gestione del patrimonio culturale: alcune evidenze da un’indagine della Banca d’Italia. Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers), 525: 1-23. Retrieved February 23, 2025, from https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2019-0525/index.html
Peacock, A. T., & Rizzo, I. (2008). The heritage game. Oxford University Press.
About the article
Cavalieri M, Gallea A., Martorana M.F, Rizzo I. (2025). Do Governance Features Shape Museum Behaviour? Insights from Participation to Competitive Funding, Journal of Cultural Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-025-09558-w
About the authors
Marina Cavalieri is Associate Professor of Public Economics at the University of Catania, Italy.
Antonio Gallea is a PhD Student in Economics at the University of Catania, Italy.
Marco Ferdinando Martorana is Associate Professor of Public Economics at the University of Catania, Italy.
Ilde Rizzo is former Professor of Public Economics at the University of Catania, Italy.
About the image
Florence, Italy Uffizi Museum – panoramio (4).jpg by Michelle Maria, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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