Voices of Culture – the structured dialogue between the European Commission and the cultural sector is delighted to announce the publication of the Brainstorming Report on the topic ‘Culture and Creative Sectors and Industries driving Green Transition and facing the Energy Crisis’.

We have reached a historical moment. The interrelated impacts of climate change on all aspects of life on the planet is causing damage that is becoming irreversible. Culture and creativity offer a source of innovation for climate change mitigation, hold the key to reshaping behaviours and living practices meaningfully and at scale, and are a source of principles and behaviours for societal resilience in the face of climate change effects.

The European Green Deal highlights the importance of the cultural sector in the implementation of specific and systematic efforts towards carbon neutrality and climate resilience across Europe by 2050. Two dimensions of the involvement of Culture and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI) in the green transition are evident: the cultural sector itself must modify the ways culture is produced, since cultural activities and creative industries are among the most energy intensive industries; and the cultural sector, if adequately and consistently supported, can engage and inspire people to imagine and co-create a viable, low carbon, just and sustainable future.

Culture is a catalyst, a driving force towards progress. A financially healthy cultural sector could become a vector in Europe, for the creation of a green vision that could set the foundations for the healing of the planet. Europe has an opportunity to put culture and the creative industries at the core of its competitiveness and its leadership in just transition and transformation to sustainability.

This Brainstorming Report recommends that the European Commission introduce new institutional forms of support and funding structures to empower CCSI to do what it can do best: to break with tradition and expectation, break rules, habits and practices, replacing them with new perspectives and forms. CCSI needs courageous, competent funding and policy enablement to be able to offer the courageous cultural interventions that a complex, multi-dimensional strategy such as the European Green Deal needs.

The European Commission Structured Dialogue platform Voices of Culture invited participants from 35 organisations, selected through an Open Call from the relevant sectors across Europe, to brainstorm over two days – 15 and 16 June 2023 – in Tartu, Estonia, in order to collect insights, experiences, and recommendations on this topic from civil society. The findings represented in the Brainstorming Report reveal a wealth of European initiatives to support the greening of CCSI and present a number of recommendations to build on and extend the effectiveness of those initiatives. The report is aimed at both cultural practitioners on local and national levels, and policy makers, providing both with useful tools and recommendations for their work. The report features a comprehensive summary section, providing an overview of the main points of each chapter.

The outcomes were presented and discussed with the European Commission (EC) on 6 September 2023. It is now published and shared with practitioners and stakeholders on local, national and EU levels.

Voices of Culture is funded by the European Commission and implemented by Goethe-Institut. Its main objective is to provide a channel for the voices from the cultural sector to be heard at EU and member state levels, strengthen the advocacy capacity of the cultural sector in policy debates whilst encouraging the sector and the Commission to work more closely together.

The Brainstorming Report can be accessed here: