Strategic Studies Quarterly

Abstract Cultural policy has undergone significant transformations over the past three decades, characterized by a series of conceptual turns that have expanded the scope of its objectives, actors, and policy instruments. Despite the growing body of literature, there remains no comprehensive synthesis of these developments or their relationship to Iranian scholarship. This study aims to provide a scoping review of the major approaches and conceptual turns in cultural policy from the 1990s to 2025. The review was conducted following the framework proposed by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines (2018). A systematic search of international and Iranian databases identified 165 records, of which 49 studies met the eligibility criteria and were included in the final analysis.
The findings reveal that the literature on cultural policy has evolved around eight major conceptual turns: instrumental, discursive, participatory, networked, digital, resilience, ethics, and justice. These shifts have repositioned culture from a domain primarily concerned with artistic support to one understood as an economic resource, a source of discursive power, and a foundation for resilience. The review further demonstrates that concepts such as hegemony, governmentality, resistance, structures of feeling, popular culture, and taste play pivotal roles in explaining these transformations. The analysis of Iranian scholarship indicates that domestic studies have largely focused on practical, institutional, and context-specific issues. Overall, this review provides a coherent synthesis of the evolution of cultural policy concepts and identifies key research gaps within the Iranian literature.