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This paper aims to analyze the “crafts” of governance within social and solidarity economy (SSE) cultural organizations, considering formal and informal rules, to support their project of democratization of arts and culture and more generally of cultural democracy. The hypothesis is that it is through participatory and democratic governance that SSE can have a transformative role.

This paper builds upon a qualitative, multiple case study of three SSE organizations in the performing arts and audiovisual production in France. Although different in age, size and legal form, they all experiment a more participative governance system, not without tensions, to face deep institutional changes in their environment.

The results show that legal forms from the SSE are necessary safeguards but not sufficient to effectively implement a democratic governance beyond the “one member, one vote” principle. Democratic governance is supported by both formal and informal rules. By experimenting with innovative participative and democratic governance rules, these organizations contribute to the transformation of practices in the cultural field (democratization of art and culture) but also in society at large by fostering cultural democracy.

Building upon three case studies, this exploratory work stresses important issues that are worth to explore on a larger scale to understand by which levers SSE can play a transformative role in the cultural field.

This paper contributes to the literature on SSE and on governance by enlarging the analysis beyond the board of directors and the statutory rules. Applying the approach of collective action and reasonable values developed by Commons to SSE, it shows that participatory governance cannot be based on an ideal or a choice of preestablished values and principles but must leave room for creativity and representations of stakeholders not only to support transformation of practices within the cultural field but also externally by increasing cultural democracy.