Assessing and Monitoring Sustainability in Cultural Organisations

How can a modular indicators framework improve sustainability in arts and cultural organisations?

A Culture for the Planet research initiative, with input from CIMAM and Alliance members, defines 34 Key Sustainability Indicators to help cultural organisations assess governance, social, and environmental performance.

Key takeaways

• A framework of 34 Key Sustainability Indicators (KSI) helps organisations assess sustainability across governance, social, and environmental dimensions.
• Its modular structure combines mandatory and optional indicators across three levels of progression, enabling organisations to build sustainability step by step.
• The framework supports strategic decisionmaking, benchmarking, and dialogue with funders and policy makers.
• It will be embedded in a Sustainability Management System and tested with arts and cultural organisations to generate comparable data and shared learning.

Why sustainability matters for arts and cultural organisations

In recent years, audiences, funders, and professionals within the cultural sector have increasingly expected arts and cultural organisations to play an active role in the sustainability transition. While museums, theatres, and opera houses have the potential to act as catalysts for change, they are also embedded in systems that reproduce unsustainable practices, since they remain “bound up with many of the forces that have led the planet to the brink of climate breakdown”. This tension helps explain why sustainability commitments are often difficult to translate into everyday organisational practice.

In the field of research, there is a broad consensus on what sustainability means: ensuring a good life for all that does not cost the planet.

From this perspective, sustainability is not only about technical improvements, but requires changes in how organisations are governed, responsibilities are distributed, and long-term strategies are defined. Consequently, before arts and cultural organisations can contribute to broader, systemic change, they must first undergo an internal organisational shift to establish themselves as credible agents of the sustainability transition.

This is why Culture for the Planet developed a holistic, strategic framework for assessing and monitoring the sustainability of arts and cultural organisations.

From shared challenges to a modular sustainability framework

Culture for the Planet designed a modular sustainability framework, where 34 Key

Sustainability Indicators (KSI) are organised into three levels of progression (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and classified as mandatory or optional. Levels of progression indicate when organisations should begin collecting and reporting data for each indicator.

Ten basic indicators can capture entry-level or foundational practices, which are suitable for organisations at the beginning of their sustainability journey. Of these, seven are mandatory, and three are optional. 13 intermediate indicators reflect more developed practices, split between seven mandatory and six optional. 11 indicators represent advanced practices, seven of which are optional.

Rather than assuming a uniform level of readiness across cultural organisations, the resulting structure reflects a phased system in which sustainability is understood as a progressive organisational journey. Organisations initially engage with mandatory foundational practices, then move towards more optional, ambitious indicators as they advance. The framework, therefore, balances sector-specific relevance with flexibility and supports decision-making over time by taking into account organisational constraints, which emerged during the consultation process. The 44 experts in the second Delphi round reflect diverse professional roles across arts and cultural organisations, ensuring the framework reflects multiple organisational perspectives, as illustrated in the graph below.

Testing and validating the framework

Culture for the Planet will first integrate the 34 Key Sustainability Indicators (KSI) into a broader Sustainability Management System (SMS). This approach aims to support a shift from isolated indicators towards management processes that integrate sustainability into everyday governance and long-term strategy.

Once embedded in the SMS, the framework will be tested over 12 months with Culture for the Planet Alliance Member organisations. This testing pase will involve museums, theatres, and opera houses of different sizes and from different regions of the world, enabling collective implementation, learning, and co-creation across the sector. Following the testing phase, the Alliance will publish the full list of indicators, including detailed descriptions and measurement units.

This process will generate comparable data on current sustainability performance, strengthening organisational learning and supporting dialogue with policymakers and funders.

Why impact measurement comes next

The framework currently focuses on what organisations can measure reliably today: inputs and outputs. Measuring long-term societal impact is complex and requires additional methods, especially for artistic production and programming. For this reason, the framework is intentionally designed as a first step, not a final solution.

Culture for the Planet intends to explore how outcome and impact indicators could complement the framework in the next phase of work. This Will help capture how cultural organisations shape values and narratives on a finite planet, what experts call the “superpower of cultural institutions” (consulted expert 38), and their role in society to “interpret current concerns for the public” (consulted expert 33).

Read the full research brief for a deeper understanding of the framework