Intersections between culture and environment: A guide to environmental management in cultural organisations

Hosted by the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) and People’s Palace Projects, Queen Mary University of London

Facilitated by Virginia Ávila (Nómadas/Ñandú, Argentina), Thiago Jesus (People’s Palace Projects, QMUL) and Paula Serafini (Queen Mary Business School)

This workshop is aimed at cultural organisations wishing to develop holistic approaches to sustainability beyond carbon footprints.

Projects, festivals, and artworks are the vital flow of the cultural sector. However, their continuity is linked to various uncertain factors: shifts in audience preferences, trends in artistic proposals, access to funding, and the turnover of work teams, among others. Conversely, environmental action must be sustained over time through cumulative iterations and learning in order to deepen its impact. To articulate these dynamics, a long-term strategy involves focusing on organisations. Organisations can carry accountability, and they are the ones capable of building lasting relationships with other actors, allies, suppliers, and funders. As a social entity, the organisation accumulates learning from its trajectory and can interweave it into diverse projects and into its own internal functioning.

But the holistic incorporation of environmental management into cultural organisations—avoiding restricting it to a specific department—demands tools and methodologies capable of addressing complexity and overcoming the fragmentation proposed by prescriptive and project-based models. With this in mind, the workshop will guide participants through a series of exercises aimed at organising environmental management around the organisation’s purpose, relationships and value chain, and capabilities.

Who is this workshop for?

We are inviting organisations that:

• Possess interest and/or experience in sustainability and climate action and wish to deepen their engagement with the complexity of management from an ecological perspective.

• Are composed of two or more individuals. Participation of 2 individuals per organisation is encouraged.

• Possess a baseline internal functioning structure (such as departments, a stable work team, or specific tasks assigned to designated individuals). 

• Work in any field of the cultural sector, irrespective of their size (small, medium, or large) and sphere of action (local, national, urban, or rural).

The workshop is free to attend. It will be followed by a panel talk titled Cultural industries and the climate crisis: Insights from Latin America, from 5-7pm. Please register for each event separately. 

For more information email Paula Serafini p.serafini[at]qmul.ac.uk

The workshop is based on the proposals from the recently launched ‘Intersections between culture and environment: A guide to environmental management in cultural organisations’, developed by the cultural consultancy Nómadas (Argentina). The guide incorporates insights from ecological economics to embrace complexity, prompt further inquiry, and pose challenges that enable the cultural sector to broaden the scope and influence of its climate action. ‘Intersections between culture and environment’ was supported by MUTUA, a space of co-creation on environment and culture led by Queen Mary University of London (UK) and Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina). You can access the English version of the guide here.

Speaker Bios

María Virginia Avila is the co-creator of the Ñandú platform and a PhD candidate in Economics (Universidad Nacional de Rosario - UNR). She holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Organisation Management (Universidad de Buenos Aires - UBA) and a diploma in political ecology, gender, and climate change (CLACSO). She teaches in programmes focusing on climate change, just transitions, and cultural industries from an environmental perspective (CLACSO and UNTREF). She was part of the Circular Culture team, a Julie’s Bicycle initiative for sustainable festivals in Latin America. As a consultant, she has worked on projects linked to cultural sustainability alongside public and private entities in Argentina, as well as international organisations such as the UNDP and the Our World Heritage Foundation.

Thiago Jesus is Co-Director at People’s Palace Projects, QMUL, and a researcher and cultural strategist with more than fifteen years of experience in practice-led research and public engagement across Brazil and the UK. His practice centres on culture-led climate action, emphasising Indigenous leadership, environmental justice, and the creative sector's role in fostering equitable transitions. He collaborates closely with Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon's Upper Xingu Territory, co-creating projects to protect cultural heritage threatened by ecological degradation and the climate crisis. His work bridges local, grassroots initiatives with high-level cultural and environmental policy engagement. Thiago authored the chapter “Tackling Climate Change and Promoting Environmental Sustainability Through Culture” for UNESCO’s 2025 Global Report on Cultural Policies and serves as a knowledge partner to the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action. Additionally, he advises and curates the Brazilian Ministry of Culture's International Seminar on Culture and Climate Change within the framework of the G20 and COP30.

Paula Serafini is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is situated in the field of cultural politics, and her interests include extractivism, social movements, art activism, performance, cultural labour and policy, and socioecological transformations. Paula co-convenes MUTUA, a space of knowledge creation and exchange and an innovation hub for culture and environment between Queen Mary University of London, National University of Tres de Febrero, and the cultural sector. She is author of Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018) and Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022), and co-editor of artWORK: Art, Labour and Activism (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017) and Arte y Ecología Política (IIGG-CLACSO, 2020).