The CultureSustain network held an international workshop on December 14, 2022, at the Aalborg University campus in Sydhavnen. Here the research group presented the results of a survey which inquired about the use and prioritisation of the four sustainability concepts—social, economic, green, and cultural—in the organisational tasks of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish museums.

The survey questions were articulated during the Spring and Summer of 2022 and were sent out and responded to in October of the same year. Lack of responses were followed up by phone calls and written requests to the museum directors, which resulted in an increase in the number of responses.

The survey consisted of forty-six questions divided into four categories: organisation, collections, preservation, and dissemination. All the questions were tied to the four sustainability principles but the relations between them remained hidden in the survey. Furthermore, we invited the museums to note concrete examples of their own sustainability initiatives.

We used the member lists of the three countries’ museum organisations as the selection basis to decide which museums were chosen to respond to the survey. We operated with four museum categories: art museums, cultural history museums, natural history museums, and a mixed category, that is, museums that were either fused or merged.

A varied group of museums responded to the survey, and we will do further research into some of their described cases.

At the December 14 workshop, we invited as keynote speaker Associate Professor Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert from the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology. In 2014, alongside fellow researchers, she authored an article (1) which inspired our network application to FKK. In her energetic talk at the workshop, she accounted for, among other things, how different museums—public as well as private—in the Greek part of Cyprus understood and prioritised cultural sustainability in relation to their various organisational tasks. This investigation had been carried out as part of a COST Action project 2011-2015 (2).

At the workshop, the invited museum professionals and university researchers from Cyprus, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark discussed the methodological and theoretical foundations of the investigation, the survey questions, and the replies of the respondents.

The main conclusion was that there is generally a need for a more qualitative investigation into what we as a research group understand by cultural sustainability. Some of the questions in the survey could be sorted under multiple sustainability principles.

We decided to initiate a systematic review of articles and reports that deal with cultural sustainability. It will be a sort of State of the Art on the history of sustainability with a particular focus on the significance of culture.

1. Stylianou-Lambert, T., Boukas, N. & Christodoulou-Yerali, M. (2014): “Museums and cultural sustainability: stakeholders, forces, and cultural policies”. In International Journal of Cultural Policy. Vol. 20, No. 5, 566-587.
2. Dessein, J., Soini, K., Fairclough, G. & Horlings, L. (eds) (2015): Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development. Conclusions from the COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.