Since its introduction in 2014, the Creative Europe programme has been the European Union’s flagship effort to support the cultural and audiovisual sectors. While EU policy recognises culture’s role in creating a better, more equal and just society for everyone, the sector only gets a small share of the EU budget (less than 0.25 per cent for 2021-2027). Nonetheless, the Creative Europe programme significantly shapes the development path of a growing part of the European cultural sector, which increasingly relies on it for support.  

In selecting its winning projects, so-called “horizontal priorities” – greening and environmental actions, inclusion, gender equality, and digital transition – have often been decisive. From 2020 onwards, following the launch of the European Green Deal, the greening priority became particularly prominent, reflecting the need for culture to align with the EU’s overarching agenda. But what is expected from organisations and consortia competing for Creative Europe funding in relation to greening and environmental concerns?  

The programme’s recent call for Cooperation projects asked for “a contribution to the implementation of the high-level initiatives such as the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus.” Greening efforts, a 2023 report highlights, should not be seen as secondary objectives, but need to be integrated into the core of any project. These efforts include not only green mobility, waste management, and energy efficiency, but also raising awareness, sharing good practices, and measuring and monitoring.  

In many parts of Europe, similar green criteria are integrated into local and national funding mechanisms and do not represent a novelty for cultural organisations. In addition, many European artists and cultural practitioners give significant attention to greening practices, and welcome the stronger focus on environmental issues that showcase and support the green-minded profile of the sector. However, the recommendations risk being perceived as a burden by cultural organisations already struggling with budget cuts, censorship, political assaults, and other crises.  

In exploring how Creative Europe’s greening focus affects organisations and their work, I have spoken with five people from three European cultural entities, and asked: Under what conditions can culture meaningfully contribute to the EU’s green agenda? And in what circumstances do greening priorities represent an additional burden for a sector that is already struggling with precarity?  

Working with tools of nature itself 

Raluca Voinea and Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, from the Romanian organisation tranzit.ro, lead The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, a rural eco-venue that foregrounds solidarity and the sharing of resources, and which is based near Bucharest, in an area struggling with desertification and lack of accessible freshwater reserves. The Station was designed as a prototype for future such organisations. The initiative was started in the framework of a Creative Europe-funded project in 2022¹ – the first one in which tranzit.ro took the leading role. Today, The Station is central to all of their activities – an applied manifesto of sorts whereby an ecological agenda is intertwined with community participation rooted in locality.  

Their hands-on approach of converting ecological principles into action together with artists, scientists, local people, researchers, and students is supported by both public money, including Creative Europe funding, and private sources. They consider themselves lucky in this sense, as funding (including the mandatory Creative Europe project co-financing)² is increasingly out of reach for cultural organisations in many Eastern European countries. This makes it hard to focus on the long-term perspective that is crucial for tranzit.ro. Voinea also underlines that the constant demand to “innovate” sometimes clashes with achieving sustainability through continuity of practices. She explains that tranzit.ro finds the balance between the two in the development of experimental eco-prototypes that are small in scale and can be used by others – from green infrastructure built at The Station to working with the land and experimenting with data archives, open-source software, and transdisciplinary research.  

Ţichindeleanu points out that many positive effects created by this type of work seem to be disregarded, given that greening indicators are often framed negatively in the language of “do no harm” or “reduce environmental impact”. Furthermore, finished Creative Europe projects need more follow-up, not only in terms of continuity of funding, but also with regard to knowing how the positive project results have been integrated further, beyond the project scope, partner organisations, and the cultural sector. “Contemporary art organisations like tranzit.ro have this specificity of being transdisciplinary, and this is hard to communicate on an EU level, to people who are more niche and maybe not used to working across sectors in the way we do,” says Voinea.   

The team underlines the necessity of a direct dialogue with policymakers, one that is initiated from the top down, engaging multiple sectors and bodies from the cultural, environmental, academic, food and agricultural sectors. They mention their exchange with several universities as an example of successful connections created through shared interests that build on differences instead of reinforcing them. For tranzit.ro, this goes well beyond EU collaborations to working with similar organisations from Latin America and North Africa in order to bring in a different understanding of climate and of how to work more with “the tools of nature itself rather than the tools people invented”.  

In the EU context, Ţichindeleanu notes that there is a need for greater consideration of differences among organisations applying for Creative Europe funding from different European regions. Capacity discrepancies, different organisational needs, a variety of climate urgencies – especially evident in the eco-reservoirs of Eastern Europe – and different societal realities demand greater recognition in new Creative Europe alliances, and should be used to foster links between policies and positive project results.  

Care is power and gentle strength 

After 20 years of managing a contemporary art space in central Zagreb, the NGO What, How & for Whom (WHW) is now preparing to open a bigger venue while waiting for new Creative Europe projects to be approved. Curators Ana Dević and Ana Kovačić point out that greening efforts are part of WHW’s wider practices of “care for the community”. These manifest through degrowth ethics, social inclusion, resource sharing and redistribution, as well as experimental, participatory pedagogy. “There is no social without ecological,” says Dević, “and no ecological without social.” In 2023, WHW co-organised the 9th International Degrowth Conference in Zagreb, and in its day-to-day work, it follows many degrowth principles, such as solidarity, building on differences, collective practices, openness, generosity and hospitality.  

Kovačić says there are two approaches to greening priorities for organisations within the Creative Europe funding system. One is on the thematic level, where a certain green topic is taken as content, a narrative line in an artwork, event or cultural programme. The other is on the organisational level, where greening is implemented into logistics, programme production, office and admin work. As one of the first organisations from Croatia to win a Creative Europe grant, WHW points out that the greening priority is not a new requirement in this funding programme. However, in recent years evaluation parameters and indicators that project partners need to meet have become stricter. The possibility of defining project results through internal criteria is reduced, and more focus is placed on “ticking all the boxes” to secure the funding. The question Dević asks is: Who is included in defining these indicators? And how can organisations like WHW influence them so that approaches such as degrowth become more widely recognised?  

Similar to tranzit.ro, Dević and Kovačić call for more flexibility with regard to local realities. In the Western Balkans and parts of Central Eastern Europe, for example, social and political conditions impede greening efforts such that they can often seem futile. Drawing from their experience in collaborating with organisations from EU candidate countries such as Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kovačić points out that “the greening of cultural activities such as artistic residencies in countries struggling with the basics of waste management is unrealistic.” 

For WHW, a more flexible approach should be supported by the creation of independent bodies that facilitate and manage the transition processes through learning and exchange, making sure green competencies become part of everyday cultural life. To be meaningful, this exchange needs to “move towards a more systemic approach.” This can be done by, for example, dealing with waste reduction and energy savings at all stages of an artwork, from its production to presentation, touring, communication, dismantling and preservation. But before this happens, small fixes like working more under daylight than artificial light, reducing unnecessary flights, and supporting local food suppliers in event production can go a long way.  

Local is the basis for all green economies 

“I am a European Climate Pact Ambassador, but I do not necessarily agree with all of the EU’s greening policies,” says Karla Andrić from Haiku Communications, a Zagreb-based independent agency supporting actors across the Creative Europe community. When it comes to grant open calls, Andrić warns that greening requirements lack perspective, making too little distinction between small NGOs and big cultural institutions. Moreover, focusing solely on fitting into call guidelines drains the energy required for true and impactful green innovation. She sees evaluation and education as pivotal areas of interest: good results need to open up access to greater resources and funding for greening, while smaller organisations working in unfavourable contexts need to be able to learn and make mistakes.  

Greenwashing is a big topic in her professional practice. She notices a shortage of concrete EU guidelines and tools on greenwashing adapted to different contexts and sizes of organisations, as well as ones that go beyond terminology and individual behaviour change. For those in the Creative Europe ecosystem, this would provide more clarity in greening directions, as Andrić warns that “without clear evaluation based on measurable indicators, even documents such as green certificates can easily fall into the greenwashing category.” It is necessary to back up these efforts with more education opportunities, not only for cultural organisations, creative MSMEs, institutions and CSOs, but also for journalists and reporters, communication experts, policy representatives, senior corporate management and everyone else participating in the cultural sector. 

For Andrić, this is connected to issues of environmental responsibility being shifted to individuals instead of high-level political and corporate actors. Similar to WHW, she highlights the need for independent regulatory bodies that are able to offer concrete support in detecting and dealing with issues such as greenwashing. Cultural organisations, on the other hand, need to be able and willing to train their teams more on shaping projects according to greening impact and values, with evaluation in mind already at the project design stage. Here she draws parallels with the value-based approach to marketing, which focuses primarily on creating a positive social impact. Value-based strategies look beyond audience demographics into questions of people’s motivation and contextual, local particularities. These strategies, if applied to Creative Europe projects, could lead to more impactful greening opportunities for artists and creatives shared by the wider community. 

Andrić says that individual actions can complement and support this shift, for example, by addressing and raising awareness about digital pollution, given that many cultural organisations primarily communicate digitally. Fewer emails and video calls, switching websites to greener servers, and minimising heavy data traffic are some of the easiest solutions. Prioritising public transport and giving up on bottled water for events can also make a difference – at least at the local level, where impact can be more easily measured.  

Finally, “We need to be more critical, more rebellious, ask the hard questions, and listen to younger generations telling us we are wrong in doing things the same way as we always did them.” In the precarious funding landscape of many European countries, choices such as refusing money from fossil fuel companies are still deemed too radical. According to Andrić, by speaking up if something isn’t right, being more transparent in what we can do, building from smaller communities with clear greening cause and impact, and knowing exactly who the people are that we’re doing it for, we can change direction and move from rhetoric to real, tangible results. 

From a reparatory to a regenerative approach  

The artists and culture practitioners I interviewed uncovered several shared points of interest. First, in Creative Europe projects, environmental efforts overlap strongly with community work, citizen participation and social inclusion. Second, to be both realistic and meaningful, greening indicators and evaluation methods need to be defined together with the organisations that have to meet them. Third, a one-size-fits-all approach to greening culture risks disregarding regional differences and reinforcing inequalities between small and big organisations, with the latter enjoying more administrative and reporting capacities. Fourth, many cultural practitioners need and want new competencies and knowledge on green issues, and Creative Europe projects can be a central place for this education to happen. Lastly, available resources are insufficient to meet the number and scale of greening requests. 

In the cultural and creative sectors, there is a widespread openness and a strong commitment to doing more for the environment. However, many cultural organisations clearly struggle to keep up with the greening demands associated with receiving public funding. If not complemented by the necessary support, greening requirements can exacerbate the presence of work precarity and burnout. Making sure cultural practitioners have enough to give, where giving extra is needed, shifts the greening perspective within the sector from a reparatory to a regenerative approach, creating a new and firm base from which greening in culture and creativity can grow and blossom.  

As the new EU budget 2028-2034 is being negotiated, global urgencies that require increased funding, as well as a shift to the right in European politics, are moving the focus away from greening priorities. In the framework of the newly proposed AgoraEU Programme, Creative Europe appears together with the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme under the priority of “Competitiveness, Prosperity and Security”.  A potential implication of this could be greater emphasis on culture’s contributions to the economy and the protection of democracy.  

It is yet to be seen if the change could damage the efforts made to green the European cultural landscape or bring new and burdensome requirements to artists and cultural organisations. However, dedication to greening and sustainability will remain steadfast in the European creative community, as it is an integral part of its collective identity in both its practical concerns and ethical imperatives. This is aligned with recognising culture itself as essential and cross-cutting infrastructure for addressing our most complex societal challenges. For the cultural sector, greening is a systemic value – one that is able to transform organisations and their projects, and the overall quality of life for everyone.  

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1. Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]. Building ecological institutions for culture. 2022-2025.  ↩︎
2. Creative Europe partners in Cooperation projects receive EU funding for part of the project budget (currently 60 per cent to 80 per cent). The rest needs to be secured through other funding mechanisms.  ↩︎