Climate Culture and the Politics of Caution

Ten years after the Paris Agreement was signed, climate change has moved from the margins of contemporary art to its institutional centre. Museums publish sustainability strategies, biennials foreground ecology, and carbon-accounting tools circulate through boardrooms. This institutionalisation is often presented as progress. Yet it also raises a more difficult question: has the cultural sector’s response to climate breakdown been absorbed into managerial frameworks that prioritise compliance over political urgency?

For a growing number of artists, activists and cultural workers, the institutional embrace of climate language has coincided with a dilution of its political force. “In many large Western cultural institutions, climate discourse is increasingly mediated through environmental, social and governance frameworks, compliance metrics and government-aligned funding criteria,” says Suzanne Dhaliwal, a climate justice creative strategist and artist. “This produces work that is technically robust but conceptually cautious, prioritising reporting structures, carbon accounting and reputational management over disruptive, justice-oriented interventions capable of shifting public and political imagination.”

Kevin Buckland, co-founder of the Artivist Network, frames the issue more bluntly as a failure of nerve. Institutions warn of ecological collapse, yet behave with procedural calm. “If it really were that serious,” he says, “surely the people who claim to understand it would be acting like it.” In this context, the proliferation of climate-themed programming risks functioning as reputational management – art commenting on the world rather than intervening in the forces reshaping it.

This critique sits uneasily alongside evidence of measurable progress. Emissions have fallen, targets have been set, and cultural organisations have begun reducing their operational footprints. Since the Paris Agreement, projected global heating has fallen from about 4°C to around 2.6°C. According to the Gallery Climate Coalition, four-fifths of members tracking emissions since 2019 have already cut them by more than 25 percent, placing them on track to halve emissions by 2030. But these gains address only one register of responsibility: how institutions operate, not what they are willing to confront. Without political imagination or institutional risk-taking, sustainability frameworks risk becoming another administrative layer, absorbing dissent rather than mobilising action.

Some changes over the past decade have been more structurally consequential. Grassroots campaigns such as Liberate Tate, Culture Unstained and BP or Not BP? have pressured institutions to sever fossil-fuel sponsorships, reducing the visibility and influence of oil and gas companies across museums, theatres and galleries. In October, the UK Museums Association voted by 91 percent to update its Code of Ethics, urging members to move away from funding sources implicated in fossil-fuel production and human rights abuses.

These shifts have had tangible creative effects. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2024 production Kyoto dramatises the obstruction of international climate negotiations by oil companies, including BP – a subject that would have been unthinkable during BP’s long sponsorship of the RSC, which ended in 2019 after sustained pressure from artists and young audiences. The play includes a satirical line in which BP staff suggest “sponsoring some theatres” to improve the company’s image, implicitly acknowledging the cultural laundering it now critiques. Freed from extractive funding arrangements, institutions are better placed to name causes rather than merely symptoms.

Yet institutional change remains uneven. A 2025 letter to the Financial Times, signed by cultural institutions including Sadler’s Wells, the Science Museum and the British Museum, defended ongoing relationships with fossil-fuel-linked finance on the grounds that “artists must operate within the same structures in which society operates”. Framed as realism, the argument forecloses critique by treating extractive economic systems as inevitable rather than political – and therefore beyond the remit of cultural challenge.

For Isobel Tarr of Culture Unstained, the letter exemplifies how institutional leadership expects artists to accommodate, rather than challenge, the structures driving climate breakdown. The result is a contradiction: institutions commission climate-themed work while protecting financial arrangements that limit critique. Climate concerns are siloed within sustainability teams, while programming and funding decisions remain largely insulated from scrutiny. “The good news,” Tarr says, “is that cultural organisations are increasingly realising the crucial role they have in driving the systemic changes needed to transition away from fossil fuels.”

Defenders of institutional approaches argue that cultural organisations operate within real constraints: public accountability, funding precarity and legal responsibility. From this perspective, sustainability frameworks, ethical codes and incremental reform represent pragmatic progress rather than capitulation. Institutions, the argument goes, cannot afford maximalist gestures without jeopardising their capacity to operate.

This caution is understandable, but it conflates stability with neutrality. The question is not whether institutions should abandon governance, but whether governance has become a substitute for judgement. When climate engagement is confined to sustainability teams while funding and programming remain insulated from scrutiny, institutions risk mistaking procedural responsibility for cultural leadership.

Where institutions hesitate, artists have often moved first. Some of the most confrontational cultural responses of the past decade have emerged outside institutional frameworks or at their edges, testing how far cultural practice can extend towards political accountability. One recent example is BUTCHERED, a collaboration between Anish Kapoor and Greenpeace, realised not in a gallery but on an active Shell gas platform in the North Sea. The vast, blood-red canvas functions less as an exhibition than as an act of direct confrontation. “This is not something that museums or galleries do,” Kapoor says. By bypassing curatorial mediation, the work collapses the distance between cultural expression and political accountability. “The oil companies hold 90 percent of the responsibility for global warming,” he argues. “We must hold them to account.”

Other artists pursue change by reworking institutional engagement altogether. The London-based duo Cooking Sections describe exhibitions as structurally ill-suited to ecological thinking. “There’s a very finite duration – a few months, half a year if you’re lucky,” says Daniel Fernández Pascual. Instead, they develop long-term, research-based projects embedded in specific ecologies, food systems and communities, unfolding over years and involving residents, scientists, farmers, fishers and public bodies. Their 2020 exhibition Salmon: A Red Herring at Tate Britain led to the removal of farmed salmon from all museum menus, demonstrating a model of institutional agency rather than symbolic awareness. “It’s about pushing institutions to take proactive positions,” Fernández Pascual says.

Ten years after Paris, the question facing the cultural sector is no longer whether it acknowledges the climate crisis, but what it is prepared to risk in responding to it. Carbon reductions, ethical funding codes and sustainability plans matter. Yet urgency now lies in naming culprits and committing to forms of practice capable of exceeding institutional convenience and confronting extractive power. If artists continue to act where institutions will not, cultural organisations face a choice: continue managing climate change as a problem of metrics, optics and compliance, or recognise it as a cultural rupture demanding imagination and courage – one in which neutrality is increasingly indistinguishable from complicity.