From Sustainable Development to Sustaining Practices for Human, More-than and Other-than Human Worlds

Sustainability is both a keyword and a series of diverse practices going viral across the museum sector; it is also now central to ICOM’s agenda as a lever for enacting better futures. In 2018, I was invited and appointed as a founding member of the Working Group on Sustainability and Climate Change. In 2019 ICOM adopted Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a centrepiece of its sustainability agenda, and in 2023 established a new International Committee on Museums and Sustainable Development, SUSTAIN, as mentioned in the introductory Editorial to this volume.

Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals is a relatively new global agenda and indicator framework linked to climate change action outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement (PA). This policy framework seeks to foster principles and measures that promote a better, more equitable and just world for humanity and the planet, and to simultaneously foster prosperity as well as a protected environment (United Nations 2015). Agenda 2030 and the SDGs have been set up by nation states as a framework of global governance by government officials and policymakers. It is formulated as a series of universal standards on the basis of technical skills and expertise in the fields of each of the goals. The shift to ‘sustainable development’, geographer Jessica Hope explains, reflects mainstream development actors’ response to global warming and intensifying environmental change. The Agenda seeks to strengthen links to development banks, multilateral and bilateral institutions, states, international non-government organisations (INGOs), civil society organisations and, increasingly, private sector actors. The aim of these connections is to balance social, economic and environmental arenas within a ‘plan of action for people, planet and prosperity’ (Hope 2021, p. 208).

The Working Group (WG) was not, however, unanimous in its adoption of the SDGs. I was a dissenting voice for the following reasons. As a global, homogenising initiative, the Agenda 2030, the SDGs and its sustainable development objectives are not sufficiently attentive to the different knowledges, economic practices and worldviews in which communities are embedded, and most specifically the non-human worlds in which these human-centred practices are entangled and on which our prospects depend. Furthermore, political systems and economies need to change radically to support a habitable planet in which situated practices, wellbeing and environment must take precedence over economic growth (Cameron 2023, pp. 226-234).

While many of the aspirations enshrined in Agenda 2030 — such as alleviating poverty, hunger, promoting equity and peaceful co-existence — are commendable, Agenda 2030 is based on a Eurocentric framework that places technocratic methods, neoliberal capitalism and economic growth at its centre. As a neo-colonial agenda, Agenda 2030 and its implementation across the ICOM membership paves the way for the expansion of capitalism and accelerated economic growth based on wage-labour, and prioritises monetary exchange as the driver, focus, incentive and purpose of social change. This priority is enshrined (for example) in educational goals, in modern agricultural, land management methods, and in heritage values across all communities. Accordingly, there needs also to be a greater acknowledgement of how communities are developing their own frameworks and implementation strategies in the spirit of the goals, often enacting their own knowledge practices in new, hybrid combinations.

In light of these observations, I would like to thank the Museum International Editorial Board for the opportunity to write this afterword and to contribute to the call for papers for the current volume. The objective was to move beyond limited views on sustainability, the SDGs and most importantly sustainable development, and the deeply modern and destructive humanist perspectives that drive these forms of ideology and action. Working closely with the Editorial Board, our aim was to welcome diverse submissions that can inform the sector on what is being done, or emerging, in this sphere while also soliciting inspirational ideas for future practice: for example, the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives and the consideration of more-than-human and non-human agencies in sustaining practices. In a world facing socio-ecological collapse, museums have a pivotal role in building context-specific and collective approaches that promote a range of mutually supportive sustaining practices for a habitable world. If we are to avoid compounding existing problems and creating new ones, we require new cognitive frames and practices of life that promote respectful, ethical thinking, as well as forms of conjoint action that acknowledge our entanglements, shared vulnerabilities and futures not only with other humans, but also with the more-than-human world (Cameron 2014, p. 23).

During my time on the ICOM Working Group on Sustainability (WGS), I was able to reflect on what sustainability means for the sector in all its diversity, but more specifically what the adoption the SDGs denotes both conceptually and materially. I developed the term ‘sustaining practices’ as a means of moving beyond the narrow and limiting idea of sustainability and sustainable development in the sense embraced by the neoliberal economy, to instead privilege other sustaining concepts. As a result, and in this afterword, I draw on arguments in my recent monograph. Museum Practices and the Posthumanities: Curating for Planetary Habitability, and in particular Chapter 7, ‘Curating sustaining practices in and for more-than-human worlds’ (Cameron 2023). I also draw from a series of presentations at ICOM events and my contributions to policy that preceded this publication. This included the 2019 resolution Sustainability and the implementation of Agenda 2030, Transforming our World, adopted at the ICOM 2019 Triennial conference in Kyoto, Japan; that conference acknowledged socio-ecological crises as a series of unprecedented environmental and societal existential predicaments for the human-non-human world. The aim was to centre more-than and other-than-human entities in the work of sustaining practices and museum curating.

As a member of the WGS, my overall objective was therefore to encourage a more critical and considered approach to the implementation of sustainability frameworks. Out of this, I sought to propose a method and process through which ICOM might facilitate the development of policy agendas and practice frameworks in different cultural, local and Indigenous contexts: ones that are attentive to sustaining practices as deeply more-than-human, and at the same time acknowledge other, that is, non-modern, knowledge practices and economies.

Sustaining and ‘ecologizing’ practices: Conceptual and theoretical trajectories

I am an activist practitioner academic with longstanding professional and research interests in, and passion for, assisting museums in realising their full potential in contemporary society. To achieve this, my work has been directed to repositioning museums as central figures in contemporary issues and debates — and more specifically climate action — by leveraging their distinctive competencies: longstanding authority and trust; unique collections; pedagogical skills; and vast global networks.

I have also been instrumental in shifting museum thinking from modern concepts to materialist and more-than-human ecological precepts. I developed and integrated more-than-human modes of thinking and acting for living sustainably in the world through novel theoretical and curatorial interventions across multiple domains of practice informed by post-human thinking. Key concepts that emerged from this trajectory of work include the notion of museum institutions as liquid more-than-human agential processes (Cameron 2009; 2015), ‘ecologizing’ methods (Cameron 2014), curating concepts such as ‘eco-curating’ (Cameron 2019; 2021) and ‘museum communitarian design’ (Cameron 2023) as ways of thinking and working alongside non-human agencies entangled with human designs, and as new forms of vital attunement.

I work with these optics to formulate more-than-human habitability practices as an alternative to the existing human-development centric approach, and have subsequently considered how this novel framework might be enacted in museums. It is this trajectory of work that now brings me back to the question of sustainability, ICOM and to the papers in this volume.

ICOM and museological globalism

Through its International Committee, SUSTAIN, ICOM is now pursuing a global agenda promoting a suite of new common interests, values and characteristics for all human beings and as neo-capitalist economic entities. In doing so, ICOM enacts a collective agenda that seeks to build a global community of people, nation states and territories through forms of what I call ‘museological globalism’ (Cameron 2023, pp. 201-209).

In respect to the UN’s Agenda 2030, museological globalism is increasingly directed to using the SDGs to strengthen cooperation across territories through a series of common interests determined by universal values. Furthermore, museological globalism homogenises diverse cultural values, economic practices and futurisms into a series of universal goals, indicators and measures around neo-capitalist economic and sustainable development.

Acting as a form of methodological globalism and directed towards the assessment of human concerns and needs first and foremost, the systems, notions of economy and technology on which the SDGs are framed are designed to enhance human abilities, capacities, wellbeing and economic growth to survive and thrive. They do not, however, address existential emergencies including climate change as borne out of a failure to acknowledge and work with more-than-human and non-human entanglements. Human-centred thinking in the west has blindly applied the precepts of neoliberal capitalism as a strategy to harness, and now protect, the non-human world. In such thinking, nature is an entity that is under human control, and is harnessed to support economic growth.

The goals of development and the neo-capitalist economy remain at the centre of the SDGs, and as such, they undermine culturally diverse, situated, and sustaining knowledges and practice, as well as material practices of economy entangled with ecology. Many of the other positions mentioned in some papers obviate a deeper engagement and critique of the relations between culture and economy: one that is required. In both Agenda 2030 and in museums’ embedded policy frameworks, culture enters, if at all, in instrumental terms. For example, museums are recognised in both developed and developing countries as cultural institutions and important sources of income, employment and economic growth, and their work is directed towards the sustainability of local communities through such avenues as cultural tourism.

While the SDGs framework acknowledges that each goal is a system of ecological thought and a series of actions in their own right, it enacts a limited range of coordinates for action. In considering this, the museum sector must come to terms with the implications of these goals in respect to what they mean and, most importantly, what they materially enact. They need to be conceptualised not only in terms of their vital cultural engagements but also in regard to the underlaying values, assumptions of agency, sense of community, economic and financial developments, and the types and forms of human ingenuity that mobilise tasks, measure and monitor performance and affirm achievement. The values embodied in the SDGs include culture as economic assets, intergenerational equity management and the passing on of resources that have the potential to provide for the needs of the Earth’s future human populations.

Therefore, the SDGs posit relationships, and differences in ways of valuing the non-human world between and across communities, as a set of values and practices that must be converted for the purposes of development — rather than conceiving these as many different practices of world-making. No singular economic, knowledge, value system, or idea of human agency, in relation to the more-than or other-than-human world or universe, exists in which all life and diverse cultural perspectives can be accommodated.

The ‘fractiverse’ and the concept of ‘habitability practices’

ICOM and its members could pursue a different agenda whereby the SDGs, for example, become communitarian design projects: that is, ones that combine context-specific ecological concepts and practices that are cognizant of the material, metabolic rhythms and systems in which human agency is embedded and on which it is reliant. In order to explore this notion further, and in the context of sustainability and Agenda 2030, I return to cultural theorist John Law’s (2011) concept of ‘fractiverse’, formulated through his analysis of the Australian postcolonial context and the stark differences between colonial and Aboriginal Australian relationships to land. Law argues that cultures express and enact different ‘reals’ (universes or possible worlds) as a series of ‘fractiverses’ rather than as one world, a universal framework, or even as a pluriverse (a plural one-world framework). In such a framing cultural knowledge, practices and their respective value systems accord a different interpretation, role, significance, relevance and priority to living circumstances and their future prospects; they formulate different habitability practices. What I call ‘sustaining’, ‘living’ or ‘habitability’ practices not only refer to humans and future generations; such practices take account of all inhabitations. Posthuman scholars Olga Cielemęcka and Christine Daigle (2019) claim that sustainability and, as I will argue here, the SDGs must be reconceived to envision ways of common co-surviving, rather than foregrounding the survival of human populations.

Operating in this way, a ‘fractiversal’ optic opens up a space which allows us to deeply interrogate different habitability realities as the effects of contingent, multifarious and culturally inflected norms, values, politics, histories, enactments and sets of relations. The term ‘fractiverse’ operates as a means to explain why and how different sustaining concepts exist, embody multiple and diverse conceptualisations of human agency, human-non-human, ecological relations and material attunement as well as economic practice; and why groups respond positively to the narratives, indicators and measures embedded in the SDGs — or conversely reject them and enact futures differently.

The fractiverse is thus a concept that can be put to work to explain how different ideas and practices operate in various disciplinary contexts, and how different knowledge practices underpinning the notion of habitability require nuanced responses and seemingly attract competing interests. Overall, it also explains why global management schemes based on universal technocratic framings are difficult to devise.

Applying the fractiverse concept as a way of framing global diversity comes with its difficulties. Rejecting the idea of one universe, inhabited by thoughts and practices, also means refusing the possibility of any overarching standardising logic (such as the SDGs) in order to adjudicate between different sustaining practices. These different realities, as per the fractiverse, might be thought of as different ways of being, doing, acting, conceptualising or objectifying phenomena, as domains of knowledge such as law, science and politics, or indeed different heritage concepts or museologies. When thinking fractiversally, efforts to sustain the world are enriched and enlarged beyond a one-world framework. Each world has its own unique system of economic, cultural, and living practices, and ways of working relationally within different ecological circumstances: ones that must be taken into account when implementing sustaining policies and projects.

In a fractiversal constellation, however, Agenda 2030 is just one mode of existence that can be put to work: not as a universal policy framework but instead directed to achieve the spirit of the goals such that they are interpreted and implemented in diverse ways. The fractiverse concept opens up possibilities for discussing sustainability as multiple reals, as well as considering fractiversal living, or habitability practices, as governing projects. The connections between these different reals can be thought of as modes of existence within a fractiverse, each with their own system coordinates and comprising intersecting lines and relations that can be composed in different ways to form sustaining projects and interconnected ecological formations. Fractiversal positions become, and are, aligned to situated contexts, rather than reinforcing the modern values and concerns of Agenda 2030 and museological globalism.

Each of the papers in this volume have foregrounded various expressions of sustainability: ones that, together, form a fractiversal constellation in which many different sustaining habitability practices come into view. They highlight practices and programmes which centre different values, worldviews and relations as multiple expressions of economy, some of which are sustaining, and others neoliberal in their formulation (and hence inherently growth-orientated). Several papers acknowledge non-human worlds and the power of non-human agency and ecological thinking, while others foreground and critically discuss the cultural dimensions of sustainability as a human-centred concern around cultural values.

When investigating the SDG framework and how its goals might be reworked in modern neoliberal contexts, three problems become evident. The first is the centeredness of the figure of the modern human in the form of the male, the entrepreneur, the technocrat and the policymaker. Second is the system of accumulation that provides the impetus for neoliberal capitalism and its development agendas, enshrined in each of the goals and the reinstitution of non-human agencies beyond their human-centred utilisation. Thirdly, the anthropocentric illusions of the SDGs must be debunked, and at the same time development agendas must be removed as the drivers for change. Generally, the SDGs must become post-anthropocentric concepts and policies in which humans and multiple forms of agency are put back into their ecological place. While several contributions in this volume gesture towards the desire to embrace non-human inhabitations, the conceptual reinstatement of the relationality of vital material systems and knowledge practices across cultural, social, economic, political and biological spheres must be central to achieving this aim. Such an approach follows the insights provided by Indigenous ontologies without appropriating them.

This can be achieved by learning to live differently; by being inspired by other knowledge practices, including Indigenous ones: an aim that Blue Assembly in Australia gestures towards by drawing on the plural ontologies of Yuggera and Turrbal First Nations. Through such knowledge, different relations between, and to, water, land, forests and the non-human can exist and be enacted: relations that don’t endeavour to turn ‘nature’ into a ‘resource’ and humans into capital accumulators. Sustaining practices are situated and based on relational thinking in which all spheres of life are considered interconnected and vital. Such thinking results in actions successful in caring for Country (a term that traditional custodians in Australia use to refer to their lands and territories), and maintaining community, both economically and culturally.

New agential and temporal configurations: ‘Ecologizing’ methods

The first step in overcoming the privileging of the human over the non-human in the SDGs, sustainable development, and the divisions that demarcate each SDG’s separate goals, entities and indicators, is to reinstate non-human agency as a vital, and not just representational, actor in implementation projects. To do this, and frame concepts and practices of co-survival, the first step is to draw on the ‘ecologizing method’ I develop in my chapter ‘Ecologizing Experimentations: A Manifesto for a Posthumanist Museum’; in the edited collection, Climate Change and Museum Futures (Cameron and Neilson 2014), and further developed in my entry in Braidotti and Hlavajova’s 2018 Posthuman glossary (also see Cameron 2021 and 2023).

All these texts make visible, and fold out, the many coordinates, entities and agencies — all those that are involved or that can be identified in sustaining practices — in order to work with them in interdependent co-surviving arrangements. In such a configuration the vitalism of non-human agencies are, and can be, reconceived as working together with human agencies in respectful, rather than exploitative, ways, as well as connecting to other agencies and entities in eco-curatorial processes of becoming. Vitalism and stewardship as ontological processes can then become core ideas and practices that are mobilised conceptually, materially and metabolically by museums and heritage organisations to more closely align with the fractiversal realities of life itself.

Fundamental to these processes, as Cielemęcka and Daigle argue, is that sustainability is conceived according to conventions of human environmental management and seeks to secure access to natural resources for future generations of humans. Sustainable human activity, therefore, is one that ensures that ‘our children’ will be able to inhabit the world as we do (Cielemęcka and Daigle 2019, p. 71). However, when modelled on the logic of intergenerational inheritance, sustainability is limited in its ability to help think through the entangled, multi-species temporalities in which responsibility for the past, present, and future converge.

As a sustainability framework, Agenda 2030 follows the same principles of intergenerational inheritance as a human-centred form. Museums, through their complicity with Agenda 2030, promote an anthropocentric focus on human responsibility for future generations, rather than emphasising an expansive scope of community and future generations that encompasses all earthly life and processes. Museum institutions, therefore, promote a narcissistic view of the future in which generations to come are seen as extensions of both current and future humans. When reframing human bodies and agency as forms of humanness radically embedded in compositional processes that entangle non-human others and earthly events, the ‘I’ becomes us’; human agency, and indeed community, is always more-than-human (Cameron 2021).

The agential configuration of the SDGs must be pluralised in their composition and distribution to expand who is involved, both human and more-than-human. Central to this is a consideration of how each of the goals — the entities involved, the non-humans they stand for and accordingly their metabolic processes — become entangled with others, and how their temporal durations might be reworked beyond human and modern time scales. Indeed, in the museum and heritage field and beyond, an empirical understanding of the relational interconnections between the coordinates involved in sustaining practices — including their human-non-human figurations, their durations and metabolisms as entangled interactions — is foundational to any implementation strategy aimed at countering strong human agency. Human time scales, like intergenerational inheritance, is a foundational concept in Agenda 2030. For example, the year 2030 is the agenda’s implementation date. This timeframe to achieving the framework’s goals reflects the human time of the United Nations, and also includes ‘museum time scales’ in terms of policy implementation timelines. The Working Group for Sustainability and Climate Change Action plan proposes the modern human date of 2024 as a goal for implementing ICOM’s own plan.

Rather than adhering strictly to human time scales, the SDGs, in all their complexity, need to comprise multiple temporalities and durations that reflect human, non-human and more-than-human coordinates; implementation strategies then need to take account of these multiplicities. SDG15, ‘Life on Land’ — relating to the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, the sustainable management of forests, initiatives directed to combating desertification, land degradation and biodiversity — gestures towards strong human agency in respect to sustainable management. This goal has the potential to engage the unique, multiple entanglements and rhythmic and metabolic temporalities of plant times with soil times; furthermore, these are in turn entangled with multiple human times of planting and harvesting, and the deep geological temporalities of minerals, chemicals, rocks, the atmospheric durations of climate change and that of multiple species. Sustaining practices are therefore cuts into the webs and knots of these unfolding processes and durations. Accordingly, implementation strategies need to be crafting and composing procedures that work with ecological complexity to become acts of radical attunement, recognising the entanglement of many different agencies alongside the plurality of their temporal dimensions and scales of emergence. In museum-based research and teaching settings, for example, such implementation strategies would become multi-layered and rhythmic material practices of composing that differ from past configurations which foreground strong human agency, scientific research and capital accumulation. By reframing the SDGs as material and rhythmic processes that involve many non-human agencies, a less anthropocentric conception of the sustainability goals might be instituted in context.

Mapping and imagining habitability, or living practices, through a critical posthumanist framework draws inspiration from ‘diverse economies’ frameworks, which challenge the Eurocentric nature of economic theorising. Diverse economies scholarship critiques the status quo enshrined in the goals of neoliberal ‘business as usual’, of capitalist practices that are exploitative and extractive; its aim is also to explore how multiple forms of concentrated power exert undue influence on trajectories of change. Diverse economies scholarship offers new theorisations of livelihood and economic interconnection, illuminating multiple trajectories of economic change that are not captured by unidimensional and unidirectional studies of economic practice and change (see Cameron 2023). The starting point of diverse economies is imagining and enacting radically different, sustainable, non-anthropocentric, postcapitalist futures, to work with what we have here at hand: that is, the agencies and entities that are present in economic practices, to the extent that they can be known or perceived. Central to such a focus is the inventorying of economic diversity, of what exists and how it can become a strategy for opening up the economy, and indeed the SDGs, to new kinds of examination and different modes of economic subjectivity. In terms of the SDGs inventorying economic diversity, this involves building an ethical community beyond development and extractive agendas, and at the same time detailing low carbon practices of livelihood. At the centre of my reframing of the more-than-capitalist economy is a transition towards ethical interdependence, or what might be called ‘becoming community economies’ (Cameron 2023, pp. 234-235).

Museums can play a role in such a transition/transformation by working with communities to map and establish different habitability practices based (for example) on low-carbon activities, and explore economy in its multifarious forms beyond capitalist agendas through dialogue with the communities in which they are situated.

Such a mapping exercise can consider a number of factors, including the SDGs as interconnected processes, the nature of human-non-human relations, how human agency might be reframed, how non-human agencies are considered and valued in various communities and societies, the nature of different living principles and practices and the specific types of ecologies, practices of care, respect, recuperation, and regeneration that each goal enacts or might enact. Central to this is an understanding of the different principles that exist in respect to the relational connections between human and non-human agencies, the vitalism evident in their interconnectedness, the rhythms and durations of human and non-human time, and how these work together or impact implementation strategies. Further to this, museums and heritage institutions must consider how attunement, respect and care for both human and non-human coordinates and their agencies might be enacted in implementing the goals and forms of economy that can support and promote these values. This process therefore comprises a thick and detailed description of and mapping of the eco-curatorial arrangements within and across each Goal. Refiguring the SDGs is a case of changing fundamental social relations and reframing what various elements mean, such as land, human agency, and trees, for example. Such a reconceptualisation also involves considering what economy means, what technology means, how human-non-human agencies are understood conceptually, activated materially, and so forth. By reframing familiar concepts in these ways, museums, through their community connections, extend community and intergenerational inheritance beyond human populations to establish place-based habitability or living practices, or regimes and cultures of care, recuperation and regeneration. This also involves changing social norms in respect to how the social relationships between all these elements are conceptualised and materially enacted. Central to such a scenario is embracing new thinking in diverse economies to comprehend the more-than-human nature of livelihood and interdependence, the work of non-humans (Earth Others) as well as humans, and to promote dynamics of resilience rather than growth (Gibson Graham 2008).

From sustainability to dynamic, living habitability practices

Through all the approaches described above, sustainability becomes living habitability practices of care towards, and respect for, the rhythms and vitalism of the non-human world and other entities entangled with humans; it means the respectful sustaining of all resources. Considering the non-human world as flourishing not just for human ends involves taking only what humans need and can use, rather than adhering to an exploitative logic that historically has been fundamental to many cultures founded in neoliberal capitalism. Sustainability and sustainable development must be reframed as sustaining frameworks that are ever-transforming; as fractiversal, as comprising a broad range of habitability living practices rather than reflecting one imposed agenda. Re-envisioning sustaining living practices can be enacted by mapping and conducting dialogic processes relevant to different communities, suitable for building low carbon practices of livelihood, and directed to building ethical community beyond development and extractive agendas. In so doing, museums could champion what I call becoming habitability practices, establishing living frameworks for developing sustaining futures.

As such, this volume of Museum International showcases the range, depth and complexity of the multifarious ways sustainability is conceived of and activated across the sector, and arguably achieves and encourages the development of a fractiversal constellation of sustaining practices. More work is required to develop a diversity of experimental and enlivening sustaining futures that embody the ‘becoming’ habitability practices described above, across the museum sector and beyond.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona R. Cameron

Fiona R. Cameron is a Professor, Principal Research Fellow, of Contemporary Museologies at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia and a visiting professor at the University of Salento, Italy. She is a pioneering figure in digital heritage philosophy, museums’ engagement with social and political issues and climate action, and the posthumanities taking critical museology in new directions. She was awarded eight Australian Research Council grants, was an investigator on 11 international grants with six European universities, 62 European, American, Australasian/Pacific museums and peak bodies advancing climate policy. She has 101 publications including seven books with leading publishers, MIT Press, Duke UP, and Routledge on these topics.