The ecological transition and environmental emergency fully concern the arts and cultural sectors. However, for many of them, budget and organizational constraints are creating tensions by limiting the capacity for action and forcing the search for innovative solutions that can be designed and implemented at the lowest cost. While examples of sustainable practices may emerge from qualitative work based on case studies, no systematic review has been carried out to characterize them, or to analyze their local development conditions and territorial disparities in terms of access to resources. Discussing and identifying these factors prove essential if we are to define and implement effective ways of ensuring the ecological transition among countries.

Alternative cultural organizations and spaces are both ideal observation grounds and experimental laboratories for identifying and studying ecological practices. Their local roots and organizational models make them laboratories for urban, cultural and social change. In the current context of environmental emergency, they can help to accelerate the ecological transition in different areas by being major vectors of social innovation in deprived neighborhoods, peripheral suburban areas and rural areas, encouraging the emergence and spread of mental, environmental and social ecologies conducive to ecological transition.

This contribution is divided into two parts.

The first crosses three strands of literature dealing with cultural third places, alternative/nonprofit organizations and social innovation. We aim to predict to what extent alternative cultural places and spaces are more conducive to the design and development of original ecological practices. The second part will present the preliminary results of a French and European survey of a sample of alternative cultural places and organizations, conducted in partnership with the UFISC organization in France (represented more than 2,400 cultural places and organizations) and the network Trans Europe Halles in Europe. The questionnaire will allow to collect three types of data: The ecological strategy of the surveyed organization; the features of the most original ecological practice the organization has adopted and expanded; its organizational and economic model. Using ACP and econometrics methods, we will build a taxonomy of ecological practices and then explain their adoption choice by organization according to their characteristics (organizational and economic models, location, disciplines and activities, social networks).

The aim is to obtain a detailed understanding of the processes by which original ecological practice emerges and spreads among the arts and cultural organizations observed, the opportunities perceived and difficulties met by the cultural players and, finally, the conditions for success and adaptation of these practices in other contexts.

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1. A world on fire. The environmental crisis as the great disorganiser
It is irrefutable that the current context of environmental crisis and climate emergency is one of the most important contemporary collective challenges, and one of a colossal dimension. In the face of repeated and substantiated calls from the international scientific community, governments and organisations of all sectors and scales are progressively incorporating environmental and ecological issues into their strategies and decisions. The arts and culture are no exception to this state of urgency. Indeed, ecological distress is already impacting artistic and curatorial decisions, as well as challenging production, touring and management models (Janssens & Fraioli 2022; VoC, 2023; Vries 2021). The environmental emergency can rightly be seen as a major disorganiser of the modi operandi of the arts and culture field, insofar it questions the assumptions of cultural policies, the underpinnings of funding mechanisms, and the routines of creating, producing, managing, distributing, and experiencing art.
Likewise, the scope of transformation required by the ecological imperative may (and perhaps should) lead to a fundamental transfiguration of cultural policies – one that is able to future-proof them towards a fairer, climate-changed, carbon-negative world.
The incorporation of environmental sustainability criteria into strategic documents, legislation and funding mechanisms for the sector is well underway, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In the context of the European Union, the European Green Deal is of significant political and strategic importance: it has a rhetorical and symbolic dimension, but it also earmarks EU investments and support mechanisms. In the culture and creative sector, it is already clear that initiatives and instruments are moving closer to the "green agenda": see the New European Bauhaus, the missions and "destinations" of the Horizon Europe programme, or the efforts to "green" the European Commission's flagship programme for the sector, Creative Europe, 2023. In nearly every policy document and funding scheme, green seems to be the (key)word. What is the effect of this at national level? What exactly is changing, or needs changing, in cultural policy to meet the ecological imperative?

2. Green. Everything. Now.
The preliminary results of our research reveal the extent to which establishing a connection between the ecological emergency and cultural policy is seen by practitioners and policymakers as legitimate and urgent, almost in a self-explanatory way. Green. Everything. Now. Certainly, many of the publications, guidelines and action plans that are being disseminated at an accelerated pace do maintain that environmental sustainability principles should guide the actions of cultural professionals and arts organisations and “be at the heart of [their] missions, projects and objectives" (Lalvani, 2023:8), thus indirectly validating the involvement of cultural policy in this planetary fight. Our research, however, starts from an ethically and epistemologically cautious reading of the outpouring of "best practice" manuals, toolkits and guidelines, especially those with a pragmatic vocation, which seem to assume that this link is obvious, instead of challenging, debating and examining it.
Hence, our investigation is driven by a multitude of interrogations: Might there be differences between recognizing the seriousness and undeniable urgency of the environmental crisis in general, i.e, between acknowledging the ecological imperative (Jonas, 1984), and establishing a concrete link with the formulation of cultural policies? How is this overwhelming “green agenda” being translated into national cultural policy-making? Is this process of “global synchronization of policies” (Tran, 2023:2) allowing for locally-sensitive and context-driven adaptations? How are policy-makers going about this process? Could the green transition of the cultural sector transform into a case of “policy diffusion” – where fast spreading catchwords and bullet-pointed action plans travel across countries in a homogenizing process – or rather a circumstance for “policy translation”, with diverse socio-political imaginaries, traditions and needs being absorbed and transformed through share sense-making? (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) Finally, could greening the sector be seen as leverage for innovation in cultural policies?
3. Methodological approach
This paper will delve into these interrogations by drawing on complementary methodological strategies. First, it will explore some of the results of a nation-wide survey investigating practitioners’ discourses around the distribution of ecological responsibility in the arts, and their positioning vis-à-vis the role ascribed to cultural policy. This online survey - implemented between January and April 2023 - was applied to 594 arts organisations (which in 2021-2022 had received financial support from the Directorate-General for the Arts