Sustainable Futures for Museums and Heritage Sites
 

About the project


The GreenMuseumHub project aims to establish museums and cultural heritage sites worldwide as pioneers in sustainable development. As part of an international network of university and non-university partners, innovative approaches are being developed to promote ecological, social and economic sustainability in museum work. Through a variety of events, knowledge exchange and a participatory pop-up exhibition, awareness of sustainable practices is raised and civil society is actively involved.

Global politics is increasingly emphasising the importance of sustainability in the face of climate change, conflicts, social injustice and economic crises. Sustainability encompasses ecological, social and economic aspects, for which museums and cultural heritage sites also play a key role. The GreenMuseumHub project is creating an international network of universities and museums in Germany, Egypt and Tunisia to promote sustainability in museum work.

Involved parties

As part of the Green Museum Hub project, a professional international museum network will be established and expanded in the MENA region during the project period. This ‘Museum Network Germany-MENA Region’ consists of three university partners: Helwan University/HU in Egypt, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg/JMU in Germany and Université de la Manouba/UM in Tunisia. There are also 23 non-university partners: predominantly Egyptian, German and Tunisian museums of different sizes and with different focuses, but also three private sector agencies, two non-governmental organisations, one state authority, two higher education institutions and one educational policy institution with state and municipal sponsorship.  

Professional focus

The GreenMuseumHub network focuses on sustainability in museums and cultural heritage sites in the partner countries in order to empower institutions and people to think and act sustainably. Through regular knowledge exchange between university and non-university partners, practice-orientated teaching/learning formats are developed and tested, internships are carried out and master's theses are supervised. The annual knowledge exchange takes place via the GreenMuseumCamps, which combine classic and innovative event formats and create a hybrid campus that is open to all interested parties.

As a communication strategy and forum for the exchange of knowledge, a multilingual pop-up exhibition is being developed to bring the topic of sustainability to civil society. The exhibition summarises the network's knowledge and exchange, links it to larger contexts and conveys concrete, real-life examples of social, ecological and economic sustainability. This project promotes participatory, reform-oriented changes in the participating societies.

Knowledge exchange at eye level 

The professional exchange of knowledge at eye level includes practice-orientated teaching/learning formats that are jointly developed and tested by lecturers, students and non-university partners. This theory-practice transfer follows the service learning concept: students attend courses and perform a community service by producing concrete results such as museum education programmes, exhibitions or audience research that benefit the participating museums.

Service learning promotes practical relevance and the participation of students in shaping public life. By the end of 2025, at least ten students from the partner universities will complete internships in participating museums and five Master's theses on sustainable museum work will be supervised in cooperation with non-university partners.

GreenMuseumCamps

The GreenMuseumCamps take place once a year and are organised alternately by the participating universities: 2023 in Germany on the topic of ecological sustainability, 2024 in Egypt on the topic of social sustainability and 2025 in Tunisia on the topic of economic sustainability. They will be supported on site by the other project leaders and coordinators. The remaining network partners, students and other interested parties will participate digitally. The result is a hybrid campus whose programme includes traditional formats and innovative, participatory, discursive and digital events.

Pop-up exhibition

The topic of sustainability is communicated on several levels in a pop-up exhibition:

  • Green Culture: The exhibition is dedicated to the topic of Green Culture. Through the joint realisation, all project partners exchanged knowledge and skills and learned about individual solution strategies.
  • Education for sustainable development (BnE): The exhibition conveys the effects of one's own actions on the world and itself follows the criteria of sustainability. It is produced locally to save costs and CO2 emissions.

The pop-up exhibition is produced ecologically, designed to be socially sustainable and uses the expertise of the network economically in order to save resources. It utilises basic knowledge from the ‘Sustainable Exhibitions’ working group of the German Museums Association.
The sustainability goals of the exhibition have a strong transformational potential that affects not only the education and mediation sector, but the entire museum work.

Professional relevance of the network players

In order to sensitise young museum professionals to sustainability at an early stage, JMU's museology department has been offering a compulsory seminar on this topic since 2021, which also includes practical projects such as student exhibitions.
Many of our non-university partners have already worked intensively on sustainable museum work:

  • Germany: major museums have their own sustainability officers (e.g. BLM, DASA, LMH, WLM, WLH, smac, TIM). Other partners focus on education for sustainable development (BnE) and social sustainability (AiK, BVMP, MPZ) or sustainable exhibition design (Jangled Nerves, Space4, FHWS).
  • Egypt: The world climate conference ‘COP27’ has initiated many activities on sustainability. The Child Museum, run by an NGO, is one of the early adopters and has opened a science centre section in 2021 and the exhibition ‘Our Broken Planet’ in cooperation with the Natural History Museum in London in 2022. Other museums (Museum of Islamic Art, Coptic Museum, Manial Palace and Museum) received special funding for sustainability from the Ministry of Antiquities.
  • Tunisia: Sustainability is a key topic of the Research Laboratory ‘Regions and heritage resources in Tunisia: an interdisciplinary approach’ at UM.