Iran is spending more money on culture, but where's the accountability?
In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani is moving to increase spending allocated to administration-controlled cultural entities. Yet a vast portion of cultural spending continues to go to organizations that are not held accountable.
With all eyes on the lifting of sanctions on Iran, and the country’s upcoming Feb. 26 parliamentary elections, little attention has been paid to the budget bill for the next Iranian year, which President Hassan Rouhani submitted to parliament Jan. 17.
A review of the bill shows an intricate move on the part of the Rouhani administration to increase the funding allocated to the cultural bodies under its control relative to those nominally under the control of the supreme leader, but effectively accountable to no one.
In a largely state-owned economy that has its roots in the seizing of assets by different factions in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there are a myriad of cultural bodies that receive all or most of their funding from the government. As a result, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which is controlled by the executive branch, is allocated less than a quarter of cultural spending. The rest goes to a long list of bodies ranging from seminaries to private foundations to cultural behemoths controlled by various factions.
This situation has been highlighted by figures such as well-known public intellectual Sadegh Zibakalam. Decrying the long list of cultural organizations that receive public funding without “being accountable in any shape or form to parliament or to the executive branch,” Zibakalam has calculated that 87% of last year's spending on culture went to organizations that were not held accountable, with only 13% granted to the Ministry of Culture, with its thousands of employees and its responsibility for vetting all films, book and music works produced in Iran. This is partly the work of the Principlist former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who gave new muscle to the cultural bodies that were most likely to be his allies. However, if the new budget bill is any indicator, the Rouhani administration has started to rebalance things by gradually increasing the Ministry of Culture’s share of spending allocations.
