Search

The Future Museums Project Group was created under the Portuguese Ministry of Culture with the mission of proposing recommendations for a 10-year public policy for museums, palaces, and monuments, considering sustainability, accessibility, and innovation issues and their relevance in society. Against this background, museums were understood as agents of change with a role to play in achieving a more sustainable future, and culture as a fundamental pillar for democracy and sustainable development. This study discusses the findings of the project, focusing on three features that highlight the approach adopted to sustainability, which included collections management, participation, and mediation. Drawn from empirical research, a series of concrete recommendations, both for policy makers and museums, are discussed. The study concludes by arguing that cultural policies must place sustainability at the core of their strategy in order to function as a framework to drive and implement sustainable development practices in museums and heritage. Furthermore, within the scope of post-pandemic recovery plans, climate emergency, and the energy crisis, it is even more pressing that cultural policies provide support for museums and heritage and ensure that they have the conditions and resources to be able to move forward in a more integrated manner, thus contributing to a sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing strategies for public cultural policies in Portugal is not yet an anchored practice. In this article we call on the results of a multidimensional study, which was carried out in 2020 for the Regional Directorate for Culture of the North (Portugal), with the goal of gathering contributions to devise a strategy for regional cultural policies until 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power, as a discourse that circulates in the social fabric, defines the nature of gender relations and their political dynamics. In a power play in which the masculine dominates all symbolic aspects of social life and the feminine is connoted as the Other, women have created a space for resistance and are gaining political leadership. Based on this theoretical context, we conducted a data survey - and subsequent descriptive analysis - which presents the panorama of female leadership in the main political bodies of culture in Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Portugal, two levels of public policy implementation are relevant: the national, under government responsibility, and the local, under the responsibility of municipalities. The importance of municipalities in defining cultural public policies has grown, given the expense and the responsibility in launching and managing cultural equipment and arts support. The growing significance of municipalities in the cultural-public-policies scene takes place along with the growing importance of culture in the context of their development policies. The two movements cannot be dissociated. This review considers some critical issues, from the perspective of academic research and planning: namely, the autonomy of local policies in a country marked by the territorial concentration of resources; the interaction between public policies and structural properties of urban areas; the suitability of municipal policies to new cultural forms, audiences, consumer practices and cultural production; and the local challenges in plans of social support, financial resources, governance and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]