Strong impetus needed to make cultural sector more sustainable ACTUEEL

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Sustainability and culture can reinforce each other, but a firm push is needed to accelerate the sustainability of the cultural sector. This is stated in the advisory report ''Culture Naturally' from the Council for Culture. The advice is addressed to the cultural sector as well as to municipalities, provinces, the state culture funds and the most concerned departments. The council calls for more cooperation on this issue. State Secretary Uslu of Culture and Media received the advice today at the Boijmans Depot in Rotterdam.

The cultural sector, like many other sectors, is still far from being climate-neutral and circular, the council notes. The advice covers the full breadth of the sector: arts, heritage, creative industry and media. Although the sector is motivated, a relatively small group of frontrunners is actually taking action. Moreover, there is still too little attention to sustainability and culture from the government. This is in contrast to our neighbouring countries. A missed opportunity, the council believes. Not only is the future sustainability of cultural organisations at stake. The cultural sector can also bring the importance of sustainability to the attention of a large audience and deploy creativity for sustainability solutions that are more widely applicable.

Culture Council president Kristel Baele said: "The cultural sector can harness its power of imagination and change for its own sustainability and that of the Netherlands, becoming a legitimate partner for governments and business. It is a real shame that the role of culture in societal sustainability transitions is still so underexposed and underused. This is an opportunity for the Netherlands."

Transition workshops

Both making the cultural sector itself more sustainable and positioning culture more firmly in the social sustainability transition is a major task for which financial and substantive support from the government is indispensable, the council believes. With this support, the sector can make a transition to new ways of organising, producing and presenting. To this end, the council recommends using transition workshops, where knowledge is developed through exchange and experimentation on shared themes and challenges. The solutions that emerge from the transition workshops not only help make the cultural sector more sustainable, but also those of other domains. In addition, the council recommends making knowledge on sustainability easily and centrally available.

Zero measurement and transition plan

Accelerating sustainability starts with operations, the advisory states. This applies to both the subsidised and non-subsidised parts of the sector. The first step is to gain insight into its own ecological footprint through a baseline measurement and to draw up a transition plan with the aim of being climate-neutral and circular by 2050. Governments must play a facilitating role here, the council believes, otherwise it will not succeed. For the subsidised part of the sector, moreover, sustainability of operations can be included in subsidy rules, as the council recently proposed for the Cultural Basic Infrastructure 2025-2028, for example.

Cultural property

Cultural property is a story apart: making it sustainable is costly and complex. Much of the real estate, for instance, is not owned by cultural organisations themselves. The council therefore recommends a separate cultural property roadmap in addition to the 12 sectoral roadmaps that already exist.

The opinion was prepared by a committee chaired by Derk Loorbach, director of the research institute DRIFT and professor of socio-economic transitions at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Other members are: Conny Bakker, Deirdre Carasso, Willemijn Maas, Harald Tepper and Jasper Visser.