Conference Agenda

The resilience of cultural institutions in navigating political change is often overlooked in European integration and transformation discussions. This paper examines how UK national museums have continued collaborating with EU partners despite Brexit, demonstrating organisational resilience and adaptation to external political change. Through my PhD research, which explores the impact of Brexit on UK national museums, I highlight how these institutions have adapted to political shifts while maintaining international partnerships.

Brexit posed significant challenges for UK museums, disrupting funding streams, mobility of staff and objects, and the ease of cross-border collaborations. However, rather than severing ties, many institutions have actively sought ways to sustain their relationships with European counterparts. This study draws on interviews with museum professionals, archival analysis, and institutional case studies to explore museums' strategies to mitigate political disruptions. From reworking partnership agreements to securing alternative funding sources, UK national museums have demonstrated a capacity for transformation that underscores their enduring commitment to European cultural exchange.

By situating these findings within broader discussions on resilience and adaptation, this paper contributes to understanding how non-state actors navigate political uncertainty. While Brexit altered UK-EU collaborations' legal and logistical frameworks, museums have leveraged long-standing professional networks and institutional autonomy to maintain links across borders. This challenges the assumption that political ruptures inevitably lead to cultural disengagement, suggesting that institutions with strong international connections can withstand external shocks and continue to operate in transnational spaces.

This research is particularly relevant to the Resilience and Transformation conference theme, offering insights into how European institutions—both within and outside the EU—adapt to new global pressures. It raises key questions about the role of cultural organisations in shaping cross-border relationships, even in the absence of formal political agreements. In doing so, this paper argues that museums serve as sites of resilience, demonstrating that European cultural ties remain robust despite political divergence.

By examining the strategies UK national museums have employed to sustain EU collaborations, this paper highlights the continued interdependence of European cultural institutions. It offers a model for how organisations in other sectors might navigate political upheaval. In an era of uncertainty, cultural resilience provides an important lens for understanding the broader transformations shaping European society.

Following the UK’s official departure from the European Union in 2020, Brexit fatigue set in as the British public began to disengage from debates around EU membership. This paper examines the transformation of pro-European discourse over the following four years. It seeks to develop understanding of how pro-European organisations shifted from being part of a countermovement to agents of change, responding to political and discursive opportunities to reframe their campaigns around new issues and goals. Using discourse network analysis of online campaign materials from key pro-European organisations, the paper investigates the collective processes through which pro-European discourse has shifted over time. By mapping this change, the analysis offers new insights into how social movement organisational networks adapt their framing strategies in response to evolving political landscapes, contributing to literature on the politicisation of Europe post-Brexit.

Following the UK’s exit from the European Union, trade was repatriated as a national competence of the UK. In this process, British political institutions, as well as interest groups that seek to shape trade policy outcomes, have had to re-learn the ropes of trade policy making, such as gaining access, and negotiating among the devolved and central governments. As the UK begins to implement its first ‘from scratch’ post-Brexit trade agreements, namely the New Zealand and Australia agreements, policy incoherence across the nations of the UK and over time has begun to make itself known. However, how policy incoherence is created, and by whom, is yet to be clearly understood.

Engaging with elite interviews of national and devolved policy-makers, as well as interest groups operating at the national or devolved level, this paper seeks to understand how the structure of the UK’s repatriated trade policy-making competences, paired with interest group strategies, contribute to the construction of policy incoherence across time and nations. Together, this paper highlights that the domestic structures of trade policy-making, the ownership of trade as a national competence that also addresses devolved policy areas, as well as barriers and challenges facing interest group access, work together to create policy-incoherence between various provisions of post-Brexit trade agreements and other national policy objectives. As such, it is the unique set up of post-Brexit trade, rather than trade offs, that produce such incoherent outcomes.

The findings presented in this paper inform us not only about the shape of post-Brexit policy-making and trade policy in the UK, but have wider implications for other multi-level and multi-institution political contexts such as the EU, for how we understand the role of interest groups in contributing to incoherent policy design. Post-Brexit British trade policy, therefore, presents as an ideal case to understand the role of groups in the policy-making process, and how multi-level and multi-government policy structures contribute to incoherent policy outcomes across regions and over time. The case, therefore, serves as a testing ground to understand these dynamics more clearly, enabling us to apply them to the EU and other national structures of multi-institution governance.