Towards an ecosystemic approach to culture and sustainability

In the past decades, international cultural policy and academic discussions have aimed to link culture to sustainability debates, but concrete policy implications have remained slim. As another emerging trend, the metaphor of ecosystem has been increasingly used in research and policy to approach the reality of cultural activity in a more inclusive way. Although discussions of cultural sustainability and cultural ecosystems have coexisted for some time, they have so far not been systematically connected. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying how cultural ecosystems and sustainability have been discussed separately and together in previous research and by suggesting an ecosystemic approach as a possible solution to the acknowledged lack of clarity in policy and theoretical approaches to cultural sustainability. Through a systematic literature review, the study identifies four standpoints on cultural ecosystems and sustainability and proposes an ecosystemic framework for cultural sustainability analysis.