One of the fundamental tasks of this exploratory survey was to unpack the interpretation of “sustainability” among arts practitioners. Given the breadth, ambiguity and polysemy of the concept of sustainability, we decided to classify the (open-ended) responses into three categories, seeking greater clarity about the respondents’ representations of this topic. We, therefore, divided the responses into sustainability as environmental sustainability, which included answers relating to moderation and balance in consumption, and emphasised the necessary relationship between humanity and the planet; sustainability as social sustainability, where the dimension of living conditions is evident and sustainability is unequivocally linked to the idea of a dignified life in terms of human and social rights; and finally, sustainability as sustainable development, which includes allusions to the need to change the political and socio-economic models that determine our development matrix. The depth and range of interpretations proposed by the respondents reveal a clear understanding not only of the latitude of the idea of sustainability itself but also a conviction that it is unequivocally associated with living conditions, quality of life and social rights. A significant number of respondents also see the concept of sustainability as an ideal towards which aspirations for a social and economic paradigm shift converge. It is clear that there is a significant tendency not to subsume sustainability under environmental sustainability, recognising the profound interdependencies with other “sustainabilities” and how these interdependencies (when put into perspective) raise concerns.

We also wanted to understand how they made sense of the notion of sustainability if directly related to the arts. In order to do that, we analysed their answers to different questions through Kate Power’s triptych. Power (2021) describes three main connections: a) sustainability through the arts – where they highlight the narrative and communicative capacity of the arts and their potential to raise awareness and change behaviour; b) sustainability in the arts – where respondents give prominence to the need to know and reduce the environmental footprint of the arts and to incorporate environmental sustainability into cultural practices and policies; and c) sustainability of the arts - emphasising organisational sustainability, the sustainability of artistic careers, the sustainability of the artistic project in temporal and financial terms, the sustainability of the sector itself. Overall, in terms of the number of responses, we observed a certain predominance of arguments favouring sustainability in the arts over the other two categories, through the arts and of the arts, which would indicate that respondents attach greater importance to strictly environmental sustainability, and to how the arts can meet and reduce their own “ecological footprint.”

Another major objective of our survey was to find out about cultural professionals’ opinions and discourses around the perceived distribution of specifically ecological and environmental responsibility in the arts, and, concretely, the ways and the extent to which they deemed that sustainability should or shouldn’t be embedded into cultural policy and into the production and management of arts. As stated before, we were making use of the ambiguous position of Portugal to look at the frictions and contradictions deriving from the overarching challenge of sustainability. Some of those contradictions became noticeably evident in the first set of results that our study analysed, as we shall see. A part of the questions was designed to help us understand the viewpoints of cultural professionals regarding the intersection between the field of arts and ecological and environmental issues in general. We wanted to grasp whether the relevance of this relationship was evident, given the characteristics attributed to the ecological problem: its massive scale and extent in space and time, and above all, its “viscosity” (Morton, 2013), i.e., its capacity to “stick” to all objects and decisions we make and its ability to appear so monumental and close that they are almost perceived as unrealistic. Judging by the first outcomes of our inquiry, the magnitude and urgency of ecological issues is apparent to culture professionals, who do not hesitate to connect their field of work with this overwhelming challenge.

An impressive 96% believe that the arts and culture should be involved in the ecological transition (Graph 1), a result that is almost the same when we slightly change the question to include the issue of “scale” (Graph 2).

These results speak volumes in terms of how they see the junction between arts and sustainability and reveal an enormous confidence in the power of arts in this realm (Graph 3).

Since power and responsibility are usually interrelated, it is understandable that a majority of respondents (87%) agree that responsibility for environmental and social sustainability should be taken on by all actors according to their sphere of action, scale and resources (Table 5).

It may seem striking that the respondents did not take the opportunity to hold DGARTES or the Ministry of Culture more directly accountable, thereby separating out responsibility at the individual (micro), organisational-institutional (meso) and governmental-systemic (macro) levels. However, in hindsight, we could perhaps have phrased the question differently. All the answer options in this question began with “everyone,” which may have contradicted the goal to find out who the respondents thought should take on more responsibility. The rationale behind that phrasing was the intention to acknowledge that, given the magnitude of the ecological transition, no-one individually can bear all responsibility. Instead, the question wished to point towards sectoral leadership, but apparently failed at that. Also, the second part of the first sentence, where a principle of “common sense” is introduced - stating that responsibility should be according to each actor’s “sphere of action, scale and resources” - could have been left out. These reflections can guide further research into the same or distinct artistic communities, and they are relevant here not only as a way of acknowledging the possibility of failure in the process of research - and thereby advocating a feminist, radically transparent research code of practice (Boncori, 2023) - but especially because they may reveal the extent to which this idea of “collective responsibility” is being propelled.

It is therefore important to read these results not only as symptoms of how “evident” and “urgent” the need for ecological transition is perceived to be, but also in the light of the Marxist critique of the climate change debate, which points out that this understanding of evidence/urgency is perhaps a bit too consistent with the identitarian mobilisation that is typical of cultural workers, and with the views of the professional class they are usually associated with, in sociological terms. A case in point of this critique is Mathew Huber, who poses that by failing to decisively connect climate change with capitalist production (i.e., industrial production) and classifying “environmental politics as a ‘new’ and non-class-centred social movement,” we have wrongly been led to believe that we are primarily responsible for climate change, and have become anxious about our “carbon guilt” (Huber, 2022: 21): “[w]hen confronted with the question of responsibility – the question of who cooked the planet – the climate movement is highly confused. Usually the answer points to “all of us.” The story of climate responsibility we hear is one of millions of diffuse individual choices – adding up to a planetary impact” (Huber, 2022: 10). For Huber, this would explain the “popularity” of strategies based on the reduction of our carbon footprint and related compensation mechanisms, while failing to uncover the more important question, “who do we believe has the real power over society’s economic resources?” (ibidem: 10). Indeed, our survey showed a clear tendency towards the rationale that involving the arts and culture in environmental efforts makes sense insofar as it is a sector as any other - ecological concerns cutting across all societal activities. This is despite the fact that the wording of more than one question in the survey mentioned the relative scale/dimension of the arts and culture sector’s ecological footprint, among other aspects that could be used to contextualise the answers. In fact, the respondents place a significant importance in the sector’s own alleged impact as a reason for its involvement in the ecological transition, as we can see in Tables 6, 7 below.

To better understand the reasons invoked by the respondents, we asked them to justify their answers, using an open-ended field ¹² where they could freely expand on their positions. Based on 111 valid statements, we did a first reading to familiarize ourselves with the range of arguments used, followed by a second reading seeking to identify the stronger, most recurrent lines of thinking. A second team-member repeated the exercise so that a team debate could be held to cross-verify our choices. After the four main arguments were identified and agreed upon, we proceeded to establish correspondences, registering their relative strength by quantifying the number of times they were mentioned. Tables 6, 7 (above) show the relative strength of the ideas that (3) the arts own environmental impact is not negligible, and efforts should be made to reduce them; and (4) the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the arts and culture sector and any other social activity, the environment cutting-across all spheres of human activity.

The reasoning behind the respondents’ statements may be interpreted as a sign that the performing arts are “irrevocably entering a process of ecological transition,” as Taxopoulou argues (2023:2), hence ready to admit that the gravity and the sheer dimension of the ecological situation are enough for the cultural sector to “declare emergency” ¹³ and to be “determinate in taking centre stage in the sustainable transition” (Taxopoulou, 2023: 1) since, as Taxopoulou points out, a significant momentum seems to have been reached in many different geographies. Nevertheless, our interpretation points to additional perspectives, which do not undermine Taxopoulou’s claim, rather complexify it with a supplementary set of questionings.

A first hypothesis could point towards some degree of environmental illiteracy, ¹⁴ and Portugal’s cultural sector fairly weak involvement in the debate around climate justice. This would mean that, prior to this survey, the respondents may have had few opportunities to engage in situations where they could discuss and learn about the implications of considering ecological and environmental issues in their sector, and thus become acquainted with the existent critique, or at least to become familiar with counter-arguments that relativise the importance of involving this sector, either by downplaying its carbon impact, or by putting the sector’s impact and efforts in a wider political and economic context, as suggested by Demos (2016), when he wonders whether artistic practices can challenge the neoliberal governance.

A second conjecture (which holds connections to the prior) could attest to the fact that a more ecosystemic, context-specific discussion of the sector’s involvement in the green transition is rather absent in the myriad debates and publications, with most of them elaborating on practical ways to engage in decarbonization strategies, adaptation and mitigation processes, urging cultural agents to develop awareness-raising activities, etc. – without first addressing “the elephant in the room”: why, indeed, should a sector as fragile (in multiple dimensions) as the arts and culture, in contexts where working in the arts is already very often a quest for survival, engage in this colossal challenge? And how can cultural professionals make sense of their stance in the face of other, more powerful social and economic sectors? How can the ethos of cultural organisations be “greened” without confronting the socio-economic background provided by neoliberal capitalism? Obviously, discussing the implications of considering profit-driven economic systems (Huber, 2022; Klein, 2015) and fossil capital (Malm, 2016) as the major variables in tackling climate change (and the associated classification of the ecological transition as fundamentally a “class struggle”) lie outside the scope of this paper, but it is useful to keep them in mind for sake of some of the discussions that we will be presenting later in this text, regarding dissent, ethics, and a critical juncture for arts management.

At this point, a note should be made about how extremely complex researching this issue proves to be. How can we inquire about such an “obvious urgency” without bordering on or legitimizing science and climate change dangerous denialist discourses? How can we make space for doubt, while Rome is burning? My position as a researcher is unequivocally committed to the goal of a more sustainable world, and this necessarily includes the arts and culture sector. However, my commitment involves problematizing issues, even when they further complicate an already challenging path. To close on this point, I will add that my commitment to radical transparency, as mentioned before, also implies a way of conducting research, and writing about it, that does not shy away of shedding light upon these contradictions and difficulties, which I argue are less part of the public discourses as they perhaps should be.

As we have seen, results from our survey are in line with the ideas that are consistently becoming part of both official and independent guidelines and reports on the subject. Those can be described as, on the one hand, the notion that the environmental concerns are inescapable and are already an objective element of consideration in the sector - “most of our professional work and operations are already weighed against the principles of sustainability” (Lalvani, 2023: 8); and, on the other, the belief that those principles should guide our actions – “sustainability is the most urgent matter in today’s world and should therefore be at the core of our missions, projects and objectives” (ibidem). But is there a difference between acknowledging this in general, and making a concrete connection to cultural policy-making?

In our survey, when asked whether they agreed with the fact that several governments were “considering including sustainability issues more expressively in cultural policies,” an expressive majority (96%) responded positively (Graph 4).

The degree of agreement, however, varies (Graph 5), somehow already indicating that this apparent unequivocal consensus hides some nuances that deserve to be analysed more rigorously, and which seem to escape the official discourse of the sector’s publications on the matter.

The pattern was roughly repeated when the question more explicitly mentioned the possibility of sustainability issues being incorporated “in the criteria for public funding in the arts and culture field” – 77% expressed their agreement. But although the overall pattern of response remained the same, the degree of agreement, one must notice, decreases significantly, almost 20% (Graph 6).

These nuances notwithstanding, the majority of the respondents, the survey showed, seem to welcome a greater incorporation of environmental sustainability issues in cultural policies. These attitudes are consistent with the respondents’ level of preoccupation with climate urgency (Graph 7) – again, a significant majority 76% reported being “very” or “extremely” distressed; 96% either concerned or very/extremely concerned.

Given the high topicality of the issue at stake, one should definitely consider the effect of some degree of social desirability bias (Krumpal, 2013) as well as the wish to present a positive public-facing identity (Grove Ditlevsen, 2012) throughout the survey. Afterall, as Rodriguez put it in his now famous open letter to Jerôme Bel, who would want “to be that Donald Trump who stands against Greta Thunberg?” (Rodríguez, 2021). His metaphor strongly indicates how powerful the tendency for one to publicly acknowledge the gravity of the current ecological situation is – the term “planetary emergency” having entered mainstream public discourse. A closer examination, however, reveals the issue to be far more controversial than the quantitative results that we have analysed so far might suggest. If it weren’t so, how then to account for the various conflicts that arise from a closer examination of the survey’s results – and, specifically, from the content analysis of the written responses, in which the cultural practitioners involved in this study were invited to further explain their thoughts and attitudes towards the intersection between their field of work and the larger ecological imperative?

Indeed, when confronted with the potential transformations that “the green transition” can bring into the sector’s working practices, many reveal fears of (a) instrumentalization and/or threats to artistic freedom and (b) tokenism. At the same time, the respondents consistently raise issues that are heavily context-related, and which are arguably relevant for other semi-peripheral countries, namely issues related to (c) increased financial restraints and/or increased difficulties in accessing funding, (d) instability/fragility of cultural policy frameworks, (e) infrastructural inequalities and (f) fairness and historical (in)justice. Lastly, another set of responses conveys their suspicion of (g) the efficiency of sector-based and nation-based approaches as well as distrust in “one-size-fits-all” solutions, to a problem they characterize as a product of “global inequalities” requiring a break off with current social and economic models. These seven points were identified through the content analysis based on a prior codification exercise activated by a set of words related to conflict, stress or dissent. The analysis followed the process described before, by which key ideas are double-verified in a two-step codification exercise. The following Tables 8, 9 summarise a representative illustration of the type of statements that were found to be corresponding to different arguments, as well as their relative strength.

To try and make better sense of these points, we subsequently grouped them into three major categories, each pertaining to a different dimension/level of conflict: political/systemic/ethical; policy/government/national; and practical/resource/material. A simple visualization of how the points relate to the three categories (Table 10, below) exposes the significantly political aspect of the juncture between the arts and the ecological urgency.

Indeed, most of the respondents’ perceived conflicts seem to be of a political/ethical nature, poignantly indicating the contextual situatedness of such a clearly global problem. The practical obstacles notwithstanding, ¹⁵ Portuguese arts practitioners appear in this study to be acutely aware of the overarching political implications of “green transition” measures at sectoral level, and vigilant of the contradictions that such transformations entail when associated with Portugal’s specific geographical and historical circumstances.

Although we have underlined the more political and ethical dimensions of the conflicts and fears voiced by cultural professionals throughout our inquiry, the fact remains that there is a richness of potential conflicts/fears arising in all three different levels: political, policy, and practical. This could be a powerful indication that - despite the massive discursive adherence to the sense of urgency around tackling climate change and environmental degradation - arts practitioners are very much aware that doing that presents specific challenges vis-à-vis their social and professional context. Their statements potently illustrate the range of complexities and perplexities motivated by the green transition, as well as the need to be cautious with “one-size-fits-all” solutions which are typically propelled by rapidly expanding international political agendas. In addition, they clearly articulate the indisputable need to promote significant transformations towards a more eco-responsible arts sector with the challenge of overcoming various structural weaknesses that to this day still mark the possibilities for development of the arts field in some European countries, while also incorporating concerns with social justice and historic reparation of global inequalities. Critically, they help us understand the essential need to approach the entanglement of the arts and sustainability in a way that does not avoid the inherent complexity, nor the dissent that the issue entails, even if that might mean working through challenges and contradictions of gigantic proportions.

The analysis we were able to do within the scope of this paper is limited to an overall assessment of major frictions and contradictions that arise when arts practitioners are confronted with the ecological imperative. The way they are conveyed does not at all, we expect, frame them as being an absolute obstacle to the adoption of environmental-friendly actions. In fact, as we have also seen, the best part of our respondents was adamant about the need to progress towards a greener sector. Instead, these results are relevant as a powerful cautionary tale, in at least two ways.

One the one hand, the perspectives and experiences of Portugal-based art practitioners remind us that a proliferation of how-to handbooks, practical guidelines and toolkits, institutional reports and legislation might not be enough to foster concrete actions if certain structural (social and economic) difficulties and inequalities are not overcome – and that there is a need for the sector to further explore context-appropriate, social justice-oriented decarbonisation strategies. This entails remaining sceptical of globalising directives aimed at horizontal public policy-making, which can hardly produce the same results in different contexts. Hard facts such as different traditions of arts funding, and funding levels, stability of cultural policy frameworks, access to information, infrastructure, acquisitive power, etc., need to be better reflected in policies and publications. But soft facts play a role, too, and they become apparent in the struggle to either translate, adopt or reject fast-spreading keywords related to the “green” transition. In fact, in the Portuguese language, for example, there is no easy equivalent to the use of the word “green” in a sentence such as “greening the theatre.” But this is not (only) a grammatical or translation problem, but again one of context-sensitive embodiment. Anecdotal evidence of this is rich. An administrator of a top cultural institution recently approached me at a public gathering, quietly whispering about a just-discovered urgent internal need: in order to engage the staff, they needed to find the corresponding vocabulary in Portuguese that could help everybody make sense of the institution’s ecological efforts. As another culture professional put it, “As cultural agents, we need to analyse and reflect on (…) the discretionary application of sustainability models taken from toolboxes with clean, green graphics written in English. (…) The widespread use of English terms in the field of sustainability shows the assimilation of discourses colonised by a global English from emancipated minds that we reproduce without question. ¹⁷ ” Le parole sono importanti!, words matter, as Nanni Moretti ¹⁸ reminds us.

Another way in which the partial results we have discussed here may be relevant is the fact that the underlying political nature of the majority of the concerns they raise is a strong reminder that the ecological imperative will never be fully addressed through engaged isolated interventions. This is a strong endorsement of Taxopoulou’s claim for robust “climate governance” mechanisms, since her research clearly showed that “[t]here are certainly limits to what the sector can achieve through self-regulation. The transition requires wider, systemic change, all-encompassing regulatory and support frameworks and an unprecedented recalibration of public and private investment” (Taxopoulou, 2023: 37). This reference to “wider, systemic change” can be taken broadly, with regard to changes in terms of the current socio-economic model, but it obviously also encompasses the need for major changes in the very way the cultural sector has become accustomed to operating and, as such, calls for transformation in the field of cultural policy and, importantly, in arts management itself. In fact, although the need to respond to the demand of ecological sustainability has been dubbed as the green transition, the changes it brings about are less a transition from one behaviour to another than a deeper transformation – one that points towards system change, especially given that the arts and culture sector has been operating on “survivalist mode” (Elfving, 2020), strongly conditioned by the growth-oriented capitalist paradigm (Dragisevic Sesic, 2021) and over reliant on expansionist and productivist processes (Rodrigues and Ventura, 2024).

A final short reflection that this paper wants to suggest is precisely about the degree of transformation that the decarbonisation and green/just transition strategies entail for the field of arts management. As many recently published reports maintain, the cultural sector will have to fundamentally be ready to reposition itself in this new reality, dismissing any attempts at “normality” and interrogating the sector’s modes of production and operation (The Shift Project, 2021). Likewise, the scope of transformation required in the arts and culture realm may (and perhaps should) lead to a fundamental transfiguration of cultural policies. Arts management will thus be required to contribute to innovation in cultural policy-making to future-proof them in a climate-changed, carbon-negative world. Whether that means simply adapting/updating current policies or introducing emergent/disruptive concepts and measures into cultural policy (Torrens, 2021) remains to be seen.

Just so, part of our research (Rodrigues, 2024) has been focusing on various elements that have pushed the field of cultural management to review its assumptions and modi operandi, arguing that the field is at a critical juncture that we must fully acknowledge and seize.

This critical juncture of arts management is characterised by a shift in the focus of arts managers’ concerns. Since they are finally freed from explaining what is it that they do (the historical process of emergence and social legitimation of the profession being almost complete), they can now dedicate themselves to discussing how they work. Put differently, they can engage in finding and debating the ethical and critical foundations of their daily doings and confront some of arts management’s underlying premises and basic processes. Case in point, arts managers have been highly active in facilitating international networking, presentation and constant travel in an unsanctioned system of high mobility, hopping on and off of conferences, festivals, and many other kinds of professional gatherings.

Arts managers, being responsible for the distribution of works of art and artists, have been determining agents of internationalisation practices, actively participating in the plethora of festivals and platforms that offer visibility and “leverage” to a series of “rising stars,” following one another at a dizzying, consumerist pace. Arts managers have also been consistently working towards expanding their audience numbers, their reach, their budget, their sponsorship, and sometimes even their buildings.

The proximity of this professional field to this constant quest for power and continuous growth is now fundamentally challenged by the discussions around “scaling down” or “slowing down” as some of the strategies towards a greener future. Importantly, if one is to seriously consider the political and ethical concerns expressed by cultural practitioners in our survey, they suggest that arts managers should work on a critical examination of its own professional underpinnings, on the values and specific language it has developed and spread, and not only come up with practical or prescriptive solutions for decarbonising their operations. I posit that this is fundamentally a good thing. It allows us to look at this critical juncture as a turning point, rejecting the expansionist and productivist ethos that was for such a long time at the core of arts management, and push it towards a conceptual and practical reassessment of its assumptions and workings. It might just be that the ecological imperative invites arts managers to the table, engaging in the most important conversation of the years ahead.