Arts governance scholars acknowledge that most governance frameworks and theorising has come from a Western context and there is room for more scholarship on non-Western practices, contexts and understandings of governance (King and Schramme 2019, Rentschler 2014). While Singapore is a highly-westernised and globalised city-state, its Asian multi-cultural context and political history suggest layers of complexity in its approach to cultural governance. A multitude of art forms are promoted and supported by the state for various reasons – economic returns, city-branding, social cohesion, national identity and the making of a liveable city. ‘Traditional’ art forms linked to Singapore’s main ethnic communities (Chinese, Malay, Tamil) are viewed as symbols of national identity and enjoy state support. Among these are traditional Chinese performing art forms such as Chinese opera and ancient and folk music performed in regional variants (‘dialects’) of the Chinese language. These made their way to Singapore in the 19th century alongside waves of Chinese migration. While Chinese opera and music were popular until the mid-20th century with regular performances in entertainment venues, temples, and communal celebrations, they declined rapidly in post-independence Singapore due to the country’s rapid modernization, prioritization of economic development, and cultural, language and education policies. One of the most significant impacts came from the institution of Chinese Mandarin as an official language which marginalized other Chinese dialects and thus, the associated performing art forms. Despite the status of Chinese traditional arts as supposedly ‘dying’ art forms with aging audiences and performers and a lack of public interest (Chong 2003, Wong 1995), four of the current 51 non-profit organisations under the NAC’s Major Company Scheme are Chinese traditional performing arts organisations. Like all arts non-profits receiving public funding, these organisations are caught up in “regimes of public governance” (Ostrower and Stone 2010, 904), held to prescribed standards of accountability and conformance, answerable to various stakeholders while trying to balance the artistic and financial sides of the organization (King and Schramme 2019, Rentschler 2014, Turbide and Laurin 2014). This research study posits that the governance of Chinese traditional arts organisations in Singapore is influenced by socio-cultural values shaped by the history of the development and decline of the art forms. Correspondingly, they exist in a paradoxical state of attempting to secure future sustainability for a declining artistic practice. In this context, the “moral responsibility” of a board goes beyond the responsible use of public monies (King and Schramme 2019) and “passion” as conceptualized by Rentschler (2014) may be a key factor in board members' motivations and behaviours, influencing their governance approaches. Adapting Ostrower and Stone’s “contingency-based framework” for non-profits where the governing board is “conceptualized as part of both the organization and the environment” (902) and influenced by external and internal conditions, this is a piece of empirical research that develops and applies a framework for investigating the key drivers of governance in traditional Chinese arts organisations in the NAC’s Major Company Scheme. The research method includes the analysis of organisations’ annual reports identifying key areas of management concern, board composition and governance policies, as well as interviews with board members and executive staff to elicit perceptions on motivations, roles, governance priorities and relationships with stakeholders. The aim is to gain insight into an area of arts management in Singapore that is at present under-researched and which may have implications for the future of the traditional arts. The study seeks to contribute to empirical studies of arts governance in Asian contexts.

References:

Chong, Terence. 2003. “Chinese Opera in Singapore: Negotiating Globalisation, Consumerism and National Culture.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (3): 449 – 471.

King, Ian W. and Annick Schramme. 2019. Cultural Governance in a Global Context: An International Perspective on Art Organizations. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ostrower, Francie and Melissa M. Stone. 2010. “Moving Governance Research Forward: A Contingency-Based Framework and Data Application.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 39 (5): 901 – 924.

Rentschler, Ruth. 2014. Arts Governance: People, Passion, Performance. London and New York: Routledge.

Turbide, Johanne and Claude Laurin. 2014. “Governance in the Arts and Culture Nonprofit Sector: Vigilance or Indifference?” Administrative Sciences 4: 413 – 431.

Wong, Joanna. 1995. “Chinese Opera in Singapore: An Overview.” In Traditional Theatre in Southeast Asia, edited by Chua Soo Pong, 103 – 108. Singapore: Unipress for SPAFA.

Research interest, objectives and question

The COVID-19 crisis and its serious consequences on tourism called for a need to measure the impact of this pandemic on visitor attendance in cultural and tourist sites (Khlystova et al., 2022). To achieve this goal in France, this research project has built an independent attendance observatory to measure and compare attendance in 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the 2019’one. Indeed, this kind of data, which have not been available to date in France, or only belatedly (one year after the visit), offer an interesting view of organizational behaviors and strategic management of sites. The research aims to answer this question: what did the French cultural and tourists sites learned from the crisis ?

Methodology

The research implemented a quantitative study with an exploratory cross-sectional statistical analysis, comparing the sample's monthly attendance figures relative to the year 2019, which serves as a reference for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. The total attendance analysis covers a large sample of 79 sites in 12 French regions, representing 18,717,939 visitors in 2019 and 16,890,842 visitors in 2022 (-10% /2019; +76% /2021). This sample includes more than half historic monuments, around one third museums and the remainder parks and cities. All French regions are well represented, with an average of 9 sites per region (except for Normandy and Centre Val de Loire). Paris Ile de France accounts for a quarter of the observatory (our sample does not include the major Parisian sites).

Litterature review

The theoretical framework includes literature mainly about organizational learning, crisis management, resistance to change, digital adoption.

Results

In 2020 and 2021, cultural sites were closed for four and a half months of the year. This largely explains the 61% drop in visitor numbers in 2020 and 47% in 2021 compared to 2019. The overall decline in visitor numbers can also be linked to the absence of international visitors. In 2021, two trends coexist in future tourism: a return to normality and the promotion of local and rural tourism (Marques et al., 2022). Indeed, proximity reassures visitors.

In 2022, the most significant result of this study is the average 10% drop in visitor numbers compared to 2019. For many of these sites, the return of foreign visitors has been lacking, particularly Asian ones, as well as groups in general. In addition, the quest for meaning and the desire for solidarity and environmental protection in holidays are also stronger since the crisis. Visitor sites don't seem to be fully responding to this preoccupation.

To address these changes in attendance, cultural and tourist sites faced strategic choices to be implemented over the next few years: physical versus digital (Giannini & Bowen, 2021), international versus local, growing versus sustainable (Gössling et al., 2021). The results show a high conservatism in the organizational behavior of most sites in response to the pandemic: weak data management, little importance given to digital data, virtual experience neither developed nor attractive, lack of creative tourism, ... The implementation of this study revealed the lack of strategic attention paid by most cultural and tourist sites to the analysis and use of their visitor data. On the contrary, the best attendance results come from the mots pragmatic sites, despite their constraints, resources and/or skills. During this crisis, they attempted to act more efficiently, taking into account the new deal of contingency and uncertainty, questioning their previous strategies and creating knowledge for action (Ansell & Boin, 2019; Boin & Lodge, 2021). The ability of these cultural organizations to consolidate or create offers for a local audience, particularly creative tourism offers, enabled them to maintain activity during the crisis and return to 2019 attendance in 2022.

Contribution

The research shows that the organizational learning of cultural and touristic sites in France was weak and marked their previous weaknesses : lack of digital adoption, few sustainable concerns, lack of strategic marketing, lack of leadership. As a result, most of the sites in 2023 are just going back to normal with the same practices than in 2019, demonstrating how much France remains a conservative country regarding arts management. The research questions the ability to change and innovate in cultural organizations.

Ansell, C., & Boin, A. (2019). Taming Deep Uncertainty : The Potential of Pragmatist Principles for Understanding and Improving Strategic Crisis Management. Administration & Society, 51(7), 1079‑1112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399717747655

Boin, A., & Lodge, M. (2021). Responding to the COVID-19 crisis : A principled or pragmatist approach? Journal of European Public Policy, 28(8), 1131‑1152. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1942155

Giannini, T., & Bowen, J. P. (2021). Museums at the crossroads : Between digitality, reality, and Covid-19. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jonathan-Bowen-2/publication/352557549_Museums_at_the_Crossroads_Between_Digitality_Reality_and_COVID-19/links/60d0fc57458515dc179c851f/Museums-at-the-Crossroads-Between-Digitality-Reality-and-COVID-19.pdf

Gössling, S., Scott, D., & Michael C. Hall. (2021). Pandemics, tourism and global change : A rapid assessment of COVID-19. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29(1), Article 1.

Khlystova, O., Kalyuzhnova, Y., & Belitski, M. (2022). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the creative industries : A literature review and future research agenda. Journal of Business Research, 139, 1192‑1210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.09.062

Marques, C. P., Guedes, A., & Bento, R. (2022). Rural tourism recovery between two COVID-19 waves : The case of Portugal. Current Issues in Tourism, 25(6), 857‑863.

Museums and cultural organizations have actively sought to establish visibility and acknowledgment of their contributions to sustainable development. Throsby's concept of cultural sustainable development, introduced in 1995, initiated a discourse that fueled a two-decade-long debate on the role of cultural and creative entities in generating value for stakeholders and society within the context of sustainable development (CHCfE, 2015; Duxbury, Cullen, and Pascual, 2012; Nurse, 2006; Throsby, 2010; UCLG, 2010; Yildrim et al., 2019; Borin and Donato, 2022).
This debate has explored the intersection of culture and creativity with traditional sustainability dimensions, leading to initiatives like the #culture2015goal global campaign in 2013, emphasizing the transversality of culture across domains. Despite these efforts, the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda did not explicitly acknowledge sustainability-related value creation in the cultural and creative field (UN, 2015). Parallelly, scholars, professionals, and global cultural networks have advocated for recognizing the cultural and creative sector as the fourth pillar of sustainable development, alongside social, economic, and environmental pillars. Cultural sustainability, emphasizing inter- and intra-generational access to cultural resources, is deemed as vital as other sustainability pillars. However, criticism of the idea as the fourth pillar led to alternative proposals, highlighting culture as the essential foundation for achieving sustainable development goals (Soini and Dessein, 2016), though specific characteristics of this approach remain ambiguous.
A central theme in these discussions centers on the challenge of effectively communicating the role of cultural organizations and making their sustainability value visible. This challenge is compounded by the absence of widely accepted non-financial disclosure frameworks and standards, hindering the comparison of value creation in the museum and cultural sector with other industries in the broader sustainability reporting framework (Borin, 2023). While sustainability reporting has predominantly originated from museum associations, museums in countries beyond the Anglo-Saxon context, despite efforts in culturally rich nations like Italy or Spain, still lag behind (Adams, 2010; Esposito and Fisichella, 2019). Despite the absence of standards or guidelines from recognized organizations like the GRI - Global Reporting Initiative or the Integrated Reporting, studies highlight the potential interest in adapting existing non-financial disclosure models for museums (Esposito and Fisichella, 2019; Borin, 2023). As the discourse evolves, implementing further research on this topic will be essential to ensure effective communication and recognition of the cultural sector's contributions to sustainable development.
This paper aims to investigate this gap, answering in particular to the following research questions: What are the characteristics of key cases of sustainability reports in museums? Based on identified best practices, what could the characteristics of sustainable reporting in museums be? How could case studies and theoretical debate inform sustainability reports for the museum sector?
To investigate these topics, an exploration is undertaken into the sustainability reporting methodologies employed by museums in Italy and Spain. The country selection is based on specific criteria concerning cultural policies, socio-economic contexts, cultural heritage, and characteristics of cultural and creative industries (Lazzeretti, Capone, & Boix, 2012; Borin, 2017).Regarding cultural heritage characteristics and the abundance of museums, both countries boast rich cultural histories, evident in their substantial number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHSs). Moreover, both are among the top ten globally for the number of museums (UNESCO, 2022; Statista, 2022). Furthermore, in contrast to the relatively abundant studies on sustainability accounting in museums within Anglo-Saxon countries, including works by Adams (2009), Garthe (2022), Hedges (2021), and Wickham & Lehman (2015), there is a scarcity of investigations in Mediterranean countries (Esposito and Fisichella, 2019). This research gap in Mediterranean countries is a focal point that this paper aims to address.
The examination of the case studies adhered to the analytical framework outlined by Yin (2018) for multiple case studies. This approach was integrated with content analysis protocols as delineated by Finn, White, and Walton (2000), Hodson (1999), and Neumann (2003), ensuring a comprehensive and robust data analysis process. The aim was to conduct a critical analysis of relevant case studies to get insights into the practices of sustainability reporting within the museum context in these two countries. The selected cases not only exemplify best practices in sustainability reporting but also shed light on the primary challenges associated with identifying a suitable reporting framework for museums.
The author opted for the inclusion of two case studies in each of the mentioned countries, resulting in a total of four cases. The selection criteria involved choosing cases from prominent museums situated in urban centers, with a future consideration for a subsequent analysis phase that might encompass smaller museums in peripheral areas. Further refinement of the selection was based on the suitability and relevance of the chosen case studies in addressing the research questions (Yin, 2018; Patton, 2014). As a result, four cases were considered: the Egyptian Museum and the MUSE museum in Italy and the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the MNAC museums in Spain.
The Egyptian Museum in Italy, illustrates the application of established standards, specifically the GRI standards and the framework, in their sustainability reports, highlighting their efforts to adapt traditional frameworks to the unique context of museums. The focus is on identifying, among existing standards and indicators, those most conducive to effectively conveying the sustainability orientation of cultural heritage organizations. The second Italian case study, the MUSE museum, demonstrates the endeavor to apply guidelines specifically developed for reporting the sustainability impact of cultural heritage organizations by internationally recognized associations such as ICOM and OECD (2019).
Conversely, the case studies of the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the MNAC museums in Spain showcase attempts to devise original indicators and frameworks for sustainability reporting. Drawing from diverse frameworks, standards, and guidelines, as well as considering the characteristics of museums and cultural organizations, these cases underscore the limitations of traditional accounting frameworks in capturing the distinct sustainability practices of museums. They advocate for a customized approach to disclosing the sustainability of museums.
Despite differences in the reporting documents’ structures and adopted standards, the cases display significant similarities in the information presented, contents and sustainability frameworks; indeed, the sustainability reports emphasize specific reporting objectives, such as social or socio-cultural topics, while leaving other sustainability dimensions aside. Following the presentation of the individual cases, a comparative reflection will be presented, connecting the findings with the theoretical premises discussed in the literature review section of the paper. The results of this comparative analysis shed light on the need to adopt a holistic approach to sustainability reporting and encourage future reflections on the necessity of developing tailored sector disclosure recommendations that can better validate the contribution and role of the cultural field to sustainable development.