We present the Museum Sustainability Self-Assessment Guide: an exclusive and innovative tool to promote sustainable practices

It is with great pleasure that we present to the Ibero-American community the Museum Sustainability Self-Assessment Guide, a significant contribution from the Ibermuseums Programme to support management and foster sustainable practices within museum institutions.

The approximately 10,000 museums mapped across the Ibero-American region act as territorial platforms for cultural citizenship, playing a fundamental role in raising awareness of sustainability in its various dimensions. To support this role and strengthen their impact on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, Ibermuseums makes available to museum institutions the Museum Sustainability Self-Assessment Guide.

This is an intuitive and accessible self-diagnostic tool, built upon a multidimensional and integrated perspective, enabling museums to reflect upon themselves and understand their level of sustainability. To this end, the Guide adopts sustainability as a cross-cutting concept, addressing areas ranging from management practices to communication and mediation, from preservation and conservation to research and programming, without overlooking community engagement and participation.

This valuable tool, which can be used independently and online, includes 55 indicators organised into a set of questions related to the primary functions of museums: education, preservation, communication and research; alongside a fifth cross-cutting function: governance.

To ensure a smooth completion process, the questions are grouped by function and preceded by contextual information regarding their theme, nature and objectives. The indicators cover key aspects of institutional day-to-day operations, such as the resources and means employed, work processes and routines, services provided to society and achieved outcomes, as well as leadership, planning and management mechanisms. They consistently seek to link the fulfilment of primary and governance functions with sustainable practices across the four dimensions considered by the Ibermuseums Programme: environmental, cultural, social and economic.

The Museum Sustainability Self-Assessment Guide forms part of Ibermuseums’ commitment to expanding its work on sustainability. This process began with the Common Conceptual Framework on the Sustainability, which proposes a renewed understanding of sustainability by incorporating the cultural dimension alongside the economic, social and environmental ones. It continued with the Museums + Sustainable series, showcasing experiences and initiatives connected to these four dimensions.

The Guide now adds to this trajectory as the result of an extensive collaborative and reflective process involving museum professionals from 12 Ibero-American countries who are part of the Programme’s Sustainability Technical Roundtable.

In the context of the upcoming International Museum Day, whose theme “Museums, sustainability and well-being” highlights global health and well-being, climate action and life on land, we are pleased to offer this innovative resource to promote sustainable museum practices that contribute to improving people’s quality of life.

The Guide is free and available to all Ibero-American museums: we invite you to use it.

Together and connected, we can go further.