Crafting Europe Manifesto
For decades, the European Crafts Alliance (ECA) has advocated for the recognition, protection, and growth of the European craft sector. The Crafting Europe Manifesto serves as our guiding vision and action plan to ensure the survival and evolution of crafts for future generations.
Crafting Europe Manifesto 2025
In response to a rapidly evolving cultural and economic landscape, we have officially updated our vision. On 22 May 2025, at Révélations in Paris, we launched the Crafting Europe Manifesto 2025.
This renewed manifesto builds upon our past work and lays out an updated, strategic 6-point action plan to secure the future of Europe’s diverse craft sector.
Crafting Europe Manifesto 2019
The manifesto was originally presented in 2019. Since then, the sector has made significant strides, but it has also faced unprecedented challenges.
Over the past few years, the ECA Advocacy Group worked tirelessly to update the manifesto. The 2025 evolution is the direct result of:
- Inputs and feedback gathered over the last several years.
- Insights acquired from our latest industry studies and reports.
- A renewed need to recognise crafts not just as heritage, but as a driver of sustainability, identity, and economic resilience.
The Original 2019 Manifesto
To mark its 40th anniversary in 2019, the European Crafts Alliance undertook a survey of its members to ascertain the challenges facing the crafts sector at the time. The results of that survey provided the basis for the development of the very first ‘Crafting Europe Manifesto and Action Plan’.
An Incredible Response
More than 1,000 European institutions, decision-makers, craftspeople, and organisations signed the 2019 manifesto, demonstrating their support to work together to ensure the survival and development of craft.
The 2019 Goals
The original action plan sought solutions to:
- Recognise the contribution that craft makes to our European society, heritage, culture and economy.
- Celebrate this rich creative sector which values the human connection to the world around us and shows the way forward for sustainable development in local economies.
- Provide appropriate support and legislation to enable the sector to develop commercially.
- Build the future of the sector through appropriate training provision to ensure transmission of skills to young people.
- Stimulate every kind of innovation to ensure the evolution of craft.
- Raise awareness of the sector in order to promote, preserve and protect European craft heritage that has been passed down through generations.