Sustainability in arts policy on the island of Ireland

This chapter explores how sustainability has featured as a policy agenda in arts policy on the island of Ireland and its implications for an island-based and all-island sustainable cultural economy nine years on from the international adoption of the Paris Agreement and 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Using an ecologies perspective, the study uses policy analysis spanning 2015 – 2024 and evidence from facilitated practitioner workshops between 2020 and 2024 to examine the movement of sustainability and sustainable development as an emerging discourse and responsibility in arts policy during the period 2015 - 2024. It explores the particularities of the duapolity and shared island in revealing tensions when a global treaty is devolved to nations where trade and practices are inter-nation dependent and internally lacking self-sufficiency. Lastly it reveals the difficulties of ‘bottom-up’ practitioner agenda-setting and the divergence between the arts’ ‘potential’ to raise climate awareness and its own greening of practices. The work brings new thinking to the sharing of responsibility and the barriers to systems change.