Museum Sustainabilities

These days, sustainability is on everyone’s mind — personally and professionally, individually and institutionally, locally and globally — so it comes as no surprise that ICOM is urging member museums and other institutions to engage deeply with this important topic. Many of ICOM’s International and National Committees have already explored the different dimensions of this pressing subject within their own contexts and arenas of interest. Our international body’s first institutional step was the establishment of a Working Group on Sustainability in 2018. At its 2019 Triennial conference, held in Kyoto, Japan, in the very building where in 1997 the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol pledged a global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ICOM adopted two resolutions on sustainability. Prompted by the Working Group, the first resolution was entitled Sustainability and the Implementation of Agenda 2030, Transforming our World, while the second focused on Museums, Communities and Sustainability. In 2018, ICOM’s joint publication with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Culture and Local Development: Maximising the Impact – Guide for Local Governments, Communities and Museums highlighted sustainability beyond the climate action domain to consider economic and social aspects of sustainability (ICOM and OECD 2019). Subsequently, at the 2022 ICOM Triennial conference in Prague, ICOM members approved a new museum definition which specifically identified sustainability as integral to museums’ endeavours:

A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing. (ICOM 2022)

The Working Group on Sustainability continued to encourage ICOM to support work towards the United Nations’ Agenda 2023 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); in 2023 the Working Group was formally established as ICOM’s International Committee on Museums and Sustainable Development and renamed SUSTAIN.

The ICOM Strategic Plan 2022-2028 refers to ‘sustainability’ alongside Climate Change and the SDGs, but also features more pragmatic concepts such as ‘organisational viability’ and ‘sustainable public investment’ in museums. Larger museums and art galleries already report annually on their progress towards sustainability goals, which generally reflect their institutional purpose and local conditions. For community-oriented museums, sustaining cultural identity and social wellbeing may also be identified as objectives. For natural history museums, meanwhile, environmental sustainability and climate action may take precedence. Other types of cultural institutions may set themselves educational or economic development goals as sustainability priorities.

Numerous museums have been addressing critical aspects of sustainability for many years. Often their focus has been their own viability and finding the resources needed to keep their doors open. However, many institutions have also committed to supporting their communities’ sustainability. This may entail promoting their role as a tourist attraction to actively contribute to the local economy, serving as a social hub for different local groups or advocating for environmental causes and educating visitors about the natural world. More recently, museums have also made changes to their physical buildings, sites and their operations as part of broader sustainability agendas. This might mean installing solar panels on the roof, composting waste food from the museum café, recycling exhibition materials or using more environmentally-friendly treatments in their conservation laboratories.

Meanwhile, web-based platforms and communications have enabled some museum organisations to reduce or avoid the costs and responsibilities of physical buildings and collections. Girl Museum (www.girlmuseum.org) is an early example that has been addressing social justice issues and girls’ wellbeing and self-esteem while leaving a light footprint on the planet since it was ‘born digital’ in 2009. Its programme of virtual exhibitions and its educational resources are developed with the aid of international virtual interns dealing with topical themes such as contemporary slavery and gender identity. A different model — the New Zealand Fashion Museum (www.nzfashionmuseum.org.nz) — also requires no premises and no physical collection. Instead, its digital collection, launched in 2010, traces the history of costume in Aotearoa New Zealand. It brings together garments, accessories and images from public museums and private owners for temporary exhibitions in galleries and pop-up shows in vacant venues, archived as virtual exhibitions. Other activities include traditionally researched publications, online resources and a downloadable walking tour of a local garment district. However, these museum initiatives have rarely been conceived within the SDGs framework. Readers will likely be familiar with museums making recent and explicit commitments to the SDGs. One example, the Climate Museum in New York City, US (www.climatemuseum.org), highlights climate action and environmental justice and advocates for more wide-ranging debate. This activist museum gets its messages across without owning physical premises. Instead, the museum reaches its audiences through presenting pop-up exhibitions, events and collaborations in areas with high foot traffic and readily accessible public transport, in addition to using online channels. With similar objectives but different operating structure and philosophy, the Climate Museum UK (www.climatemuseumuk.org) is established as a Community Interest Company (CIC). Its members are distributed around Britain, bringing a range of creative and cultural backgrounds and skills, predominantly artists across all media. They work in partnership with other organisations including museums and take original, engaging and proactive approaches to sustainabilities. Also based in New York City, the Rubin Museum of Art (www.rubinmuseum. org), a specialist collection of Himalayan art, is undergoing a transformation into a global museum, dispensing with its main museum premises and sharing its collection through loans, installations and digital offerings in recognition of the SDGs. The Editorial Board recognised the imperative for museums to further advance discussion of this vital topic more broadly, following Museum International’s issue on Museums and Local Development in 2019 (Vol. 71, No. 3-4). But what exactly does ‘sustainability’ mean now in both theory and in practice, in the different contexts in which museums operate and amid new thinking coming out of communities and universities, among policymakers and business leaders, as well as museum staff and their stakeholders? For this issue, we threw the call for papers wide open to garner a range of interpretations and responses, acknowledging that ‘sustainability’ is a multi-dimensional and often contested notion. The gratifying response was a record number of proposals that represented a wide range of sustainability concepts from authors around the globe and from a variety of museum settings, making the final selection a difficult task.

Broad in scope, impossible to define

As one of the authors featured in this volume, John Kenneth Paranda, notes in his article on curating in a time of complex global crises, ‘the concept of “sustainability” often encounters challenges due to its widespread use and inherent vagueness’ (p. 61). As we found, this is reflected in the field of museums and museum studies; but it has not deterred museums from thinking creatively and taking action. The Editors received a rich diversity of proposals for this issue, each with context-specific angles and interpretations around the notion of ‘sustainability’.

According to the Dictionary of Museology (Mairesse 2023, p. 521):

Sustainability is the ability to continue to exist. In environmental terms, it refers to the capacity for humankind and the biosphere to coexist in a balanced environment. It implies careful use of renewable (and especially) non-renewable resources. The principal domains reflect those cited for sustainable development: environment; economy; society; culture, technology and politics. Individual museums will address sustainability by ensuring the survival of their buildings, collections, financial resources and political support; however, museums can also play a significant role in sustaining local economies, local cultural and natural capital and local communities.

The articles in this issue touch on many of the aspects of sustainability identified in this inclusive definition. While the term itself is protean, fluid and sometimes ambiguous, the articles in this issue collectively address what have been identified as the four pillars of sustainability: environmental, social, economic and cultural. Some respond to specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or, more broadly, to the ‘5 Ps’: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnerships. All have something to teach us.

Part I Ambitious Goals, Holistic Approaches

Museums have the potential to address some, if not all, of the 17 SDGs which form the core of The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the United Nations in 2015. The first three papers address these high-level ambitions with practical tools, such as Christos Carras’ inclusive approach to strategic planning designed to aid museums in achieving their sustainability goals. Carras reminds us that reporting on a museum’s actions is not the principal objective, though — instead, making real contributions towards sustainability is what matters. Aleksandra Nikolić and Nataša Petrović focus more closely on collections and the concept of Circular Economy to optimise both cultural and environmental resources, while Nezka Pfeifer and Rogerio Satil explore the symbiotic benefits of dismantling the established dichotomy of nature and culture in their interdisciplinary case study from the Sachs Museum at the Missouri Botanical Garden in the US.

Part II Museums & Climate Action

Understanding the imperatives which drive climate change activists to use museums and art galleries as sites of protest informs the work of Beatriz Salinas Marambio. Her findings lead her to call on museums to both support and enact ‘transformative communication’, build on existing community trust and engage powerfully with contemporary concerns — specifically destructive climate change. Colleagues in Australia, Andrea Spencer-Cooke, Jenny Newell, Carmel Reyes and Zehra Ahmed, are painfully aware of the damage experienced by communities through bush-fires, droughts and flooding. They are also aware that the challenges generated by an ever-present climate crisis are too big for a single institution to address alone. By working together, two leading Australia-based museums have supported each other to develop approaches that address sustainability issues and climate change, recognising that museums must be active participants in seeking and communicating strategies and solutions. Their case study models collaborative action which can be adopted by other museums choosing to work together on one of our most critical real-world problems.

Drawing on his work at a university-based art museum, John Kenneth Paranada brings a different perspective, closely engaging with artists and scientists. Recently appointed as Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia in the UK, he acknowledges that traditional institutional silos may be barriers to transdisciplinary and multicultural ways of working; he nevertheless relishes the fact that these can drive the creative impulse to bring together unlikely partners and subject matter, thereby shining different lights on climate change and allowing museums to advocate for new policies and practices, potentially with global impact. The example of the Sediment Spirit exhibition illustrates the fruitful partnership between a climate change-focused scientific research institute and a university art museum to expand world views and possibilities, exploring a compelling subject through different lenses and provoking its audiences to re-imagine what climate change means and does.

Part III Nature, Heritage & Curation: Mountains, Seas, Gardens

How museums engage with themes of natural environment and ecosystems means branching out far beyond traditional natural history concerns, strongly emphasising key messages about sustainability and nature in exhibition content, design and practices. Marie-Theres Fojuth contrasts approaches to interpreting mountains and their complex ecologies in Germany and Norway, highlighting the dimension of time which dwarfs embodied human experiences. Meanwhile, oceans and fresh waters are the focus of Blue Assembly, a three-year multi-dimensional project of research, exhibitions, debates, and other activities undertaken at Queensland University Art Gallery. As laid out by Jacqueline Chlanda, Léuli Eshrāghi, Peta Rake and their team of researchers, the programme responds to Australian climate action initiatives and carbon neutrality targets through different transoceanic lenses, and has yielded an insightful case study. Next, Flavia Palermo seeks answers at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, UK, to her central question: ‘what has real value and is worth preserving for the next generations?’. Her response is a ‘deeply ecologising’ analysis of the museum and the gardens, the latter being integral to the Horniman’s collections, interpretation and visitor experience as well as to its digital presence. She urges other museums to reflect on their own potential and appreciate their wider possibilities in the present moment.

Part IV Sustainable Practices for Storage and Conservation

Creating a new storage facility on a ‘greenfield’ site away from urban pollution, noise and potentially harmful vibrations presented the Musée du Louvre’s Conservation Centre in northern France with a rare opportunity to consider all aspects of sustainability in the design of its building, systems and processes, This landmark development, in the words of authors Marie-Lys Marguerite and Hélène Vassal, underlines the museum’s attempts ‘to reconcile environmental sustainability and social responsibility with conservation standards’. Their case study offers the museum sector an instructive exemplar which promises to inform the sustainable management of collections over the next decades. Another French initiative in this arena is described by Caroline Biro, who in her case study describes efforts at museums in Rouen, France to develop bio-based materials suitable for the transport, conservation, exhibition and storage of museum collections. The results, while not yet definitive, promise to transform collection management practices through the use of more environmentally sound materials and processes.

Part V Cultural & Social Sustainabilities

Building the first national museum in a new nation state is a brave endeavour, but in South Sudan it has been seen as essential to fostering an emerging national identity. Elke Selter and Jok Madut Jok describe a project to develop a museum and archive through participatory processes in a developing state: one where museums are unfamiliar concepts, and where both citizens and museum professionals face many other demanding realities, including civil conflict. Of the 5 Ps, Peace is the most urgent one now, and the most elusive. When work on the ground comes to a halt, the chance to track down collections held in museums and other institutions abroad still offers hope that goals of cultural sustainability and social justice are achievable. Human rights are the focus of the Hungarian case study presented by Zsuzsanna Fehér, Melanie Kay Smith and Katalin Ásványi. Deliberately identifying and grappling with certain SDGs tied to human-rights, the authors examine how the Ludwig Museum has engaged with disadvantaged people within and beyond the museum’s galleries of contemporary art. From the homeless and the lonely to the visually impaired and the much-discriminatedagainst Roma, the museum understood that they needed to do much more to meaningfully involve these under-served audiences and support their wellbeing.

The dislocation of material culture far from communities of origin into western museum collections continues to adversely impact the cultural wellbeing, identities and cultural connections of many people in countries where well-intentioned attempts to support ‘development’ from external actors fail to make the positive difference envisaged. Some of colonialism’s disruptive legacies can be more substantively addressed when an originating community is able to re-connect and re-engage with their material culture and intangible heritage. Murielle Sandra Tiako Djomatchoua’s example from Cameroon ‘frees’ captive heritage from the confines of several museums and collections in Germany to restore the prestige and power of regalia crucial to an Indigenous people’s traditional relationships with land and the environment, and set in train what the authors terms as ‘homemade’ approaches to sustainable development: ones led by those whose lives will benefit directly. Meanwhile, Guido Fackler more broadly interrogates the responses of German museums to social, cultural and political imperatives, urging them to rethink their purpose and reframe their goals from traditional research and education objectives towards pro-active social roles addressing social issues in their immediate communities. Fackler underlines that museums now also need to take ethical responsibility for tangible and intangible heritage that they hold, engage with originating communities, thus realising new-found potential for positive impacts for sustainable development both at home and abroad.

Concluding remarks: A timely reflection

We are honoured that internationally renowned thought leader Fiona Cameron of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia, agreed to share her reflections on the papers that form the current issue. She has challenged all of us involved in any way with museums, heritage organisations and museum studies to recognise that ours is a more-than-human world, urging us to open our minds to new concepts which can lead museums to fully embrace their planetary responsibilities and grasp new opportunities through implementing sustaining practices in all dimensions of their work.

Cameron presents us with a stern critique of the SDGs and signals new directions with discussions of the ‘fractiverse’ and other unfamiliar concepts. She strongly suggests that we all consider her wider concept of ‘sustaining practices’, a topic included in our call for papers but one that attracted no responses. Sustaining practices is the thread running through Cameron’s most recent contribution to museum debate (Cameron 2023). In her Afterword she reminds us that there is not yet any consensus around sustainabilities, either globally or within ICOM. She provokes us to expand our thinking beyond the 2030 schedule set out for the SDGs and beyond human-defined (or at least westerndefined) timeframes in general, to take account of the more-than-human world that operates according to different temporal rhythms. She critiques the anthropocentricity of the SDGs and encourages us instead to focus on ‘mutually supporting sustaining practices for a habitable world’, giving active consideration to more-than-human and non-human agencies. The SDGs have emerged from the dominant western perspectives of capitalism and its economic drivers for growth. However, as organisations embedded in their communities, museums can contribute to ‘building context specific and collective approaches’, drawing respectfully and inclusively on Indigenous and local perspectives and practices. They can then respond to different environments and concepts of timing, adopting non-human temporal durations and rhythms that matter in their own local other-than-human worlds. Cameron believes that museums have a constructive role to play in shifting individual and collective behaviours, thus supporting their communities to shape positive futures. This Afterword demands our full attention.

Within their local and Indigenous communities, and among their staff and volunteers, museums have access to unlimited creativity and deep knowledge to address the many facets of sustainability, and to implement imaginative solutions and daring experiments and advocate for both human and non-human futures. What museums may lack in financial resources, they must compensate for through enterprise, boldness, collaboration and, most of all, the will to effect meaningful change. This double issue of Museum International offers a mere snapshot of the innovative thinking, experiences and practices exercising the minds of academics, practitioners, managers and museums’ host communities. It was clear from the outset that Museum Sustainabilities would not and could not be comprehensive or definitive in its scope: museums are dynamic organisations which must continue to evolve, making new connections, encountering new ideas, joining new communities of interest, entering new partnerships, working in new ways, facing new real-life issues and working alongside others to explain and address them with a common sense of purpose. ‘Sustainabilities’, however defined, will be constant concerns well beyond 2030. Several key questions addressed in this issue should be probed and debated further: What is the scope of sustainability and sustainable development? How can museums make active and meaningful contributions towards their goals? Who or what will benefit from sustainability action by museums?