Mapping Culture and Sustainability: A Critical Approach to an Abundance of Meanings

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) address broad environmental, economic and social sustainability concerns. The inclusion of culture was part of the debate until the adoption of the SDGs in 2015. Among other things, the complexity of the meaning of culture alone, and in combination with sustainability, made this inclusion challenging. Along the way, there have been several attempts to define cultural sustainability and make the composite term applicable to museums, for example. This article presents the CultureSustain model, which attempts to map the combinations of culture and sustainability on a critical discourse-theoretical basis rather than defining the concept. Thus, the purpose is not to lock the meaning of the signifier cultural sustainability within a hegemonic logic. Instead, the mapping is proposed in order to better understand the composite term’s complexity and to help reflect critically and pragmatically on which forms of culture and cultural sustainability are addressed in various discourses.