Planting Seeds in Concrete

In a time of compounding crises, cultural organizations are not sufficiently exploiting their transformative potentials when it comes to sustainability. Scholars call for an integration of cultural sustainability into sustainable development frameworks but leave cultural organizations to figure out how on their own. Seeking to contribute to the discussion on how organizations and policy may approach an integration of cultural sustainability ambitions, this thesis looks at what is currently being done by asking: How do cultural centres in Luxembourg articulate their values around sustainability and implement them in their organization? Using an adaptation of the Value-Based-Approach this study investigates two of Luxembourg's pluri-disciplinary art centres: Rotondes in Luxembourg City and Kulturfabirk (Kufa) in Esch-sur-Alzette. These spaces have their roots in community, but their policy-historical backgrounds are rather different: one having emerged from grassroots counterculture, the other from top-down cultural policy. Using semi-structured interviews with staff members from both organizations, this study aims to investigate how sustainability values are articulated and realized, and how the policy context may influence this. Building on Hawkes' four-pillar model of sustainable development, cultural centres manifest themselves not simply as implementors of sustainability values, but as active laboratories where these values are created and contested. Findings suggest a correlation between policy context and an organization's approach to value realization: an outside-in projection of values for Rotondes, the policy project, which becomes a platform for others to communicate sustainability, and on the other hand an inside-out projection of values for Kulturfabrik, the bottoms-up organization, that is more so a steward of its historically embedded values. This thesis seeks to contribute to cultural economics by offering an analysis of how value-driven institutions navigate tensions between autonomy, impact, and sustainability, especially in the Luxembourgish context where culture is well supported, and funding is relatively generous stable.