Sustainability Toolkit Updates January 2026
CIMAM is pleased to share a new set of updates to its Sustainability Toolkit, continuing its commitment to supporting museum professionals with relevant, critically informed, and practice-oriented resources. The latest additions expand the Toolkit across action-oriented guidance, inspiring research, and key readings addressing sustainability from local, global, and systemic perspectives.
Action Plans, Guidelines, and Protocols
Agency, participation and solidarity: people-centred sustainable development, (January 2026)
Developed by Henry McGhie (Curating Tomorrow), this new guide offers practical and conceptual tools for museums and cultural institutions engaging with sustainable development, human rights, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).The guide supports both bottom-up participation and top-down institutional action, helping museums create enabling environments for sustainable development. It foregrounds the role of culture as an integral component of sustainability and offers a clear framework to better understand and activate institutional agency in relation to social, environmental, and governance challenges.
Inspiring Projects, Platforms, and Resources
Creative shifts: Empowering culture for sustainable living:
This report examines the cultural and creative sectors’ ongoing shift toward sustainability, emphasising the critical role of culture, creativity, and the arts in fostering the mindset changes required for a just, inclusive, and equitable green transition. Produced within the framework of the EU Work Plan for Culture 2023–2026, the report is the outcome of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) group on the green transition of the cultural and creative sectors (2024–2025). While climate action has traditionally focused on sectors such as energy and transport, the report argues for a more strategic integration of culture into sustainability policies, highlighting both its transformative potential and the urgent need to address the ecological footprint of the sector itself.
Readings & Podcasts
The Climate Reader: Propositions, poetics, operations:
This publication brings together contributions originally published by L’Internationale Online in the context of the Climate Forum (I–IV), a seminar series hosted by HDK-Valand (2023–2025) as part of the four-year project Museum of the Commons. Featuring over twenty artists, curators, academics, and activists, the reader operates as an iterative space for dialogue across discursive, artistic, political, and operational registers, responding to the accelerating realities of climate breakdown and ecological degradation.
Cultural institutions facing the challenge of sustainability: from theory to practice. An introduction.
Guest edited by Prof. Dr. Leticia Labaronne together with Elena Borin and Mara Cerquetti for Il Capitale Culturale – Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, this special issue explores how cultural organisations can act as catalysts for sustainability transitions. The introduction highlights the persistent gap between sustainability discourse and its effective implementation, while pointing to pathways for museums to become more accountable, resilient, and future-oriented institutions.