Green’s the word : cultural policies and the ecological turn

The paper highlights the urgent integration of environmental sustainability into cultural policies due to the ongoing ecological emergency, a link which, preliminary research suggests, has a strong perceived legitimacy among cultural practitioners. It investigates how are cultural policies addressing the ecological imperative, beyond the incorporation of the sustainability rhetoric. Based on a comprehensive survey of arts organisations in Portugal, policy document analysis, and reflective field notes, it discusses how the overwhelming ‘green agenda’ is being translated into national cultural policymaking. Key questions are whether the global synchronization around green policies might be resulting in homogenization/policy diffusion processes, whereby different governments attune themselves in a movement akin to epistemic governance, or whether the push towards ‘greening’ cultural policies is allowing for context-sensitive adaptations and leading to innovation and reassessment of traditional cultural paradigms.