Resilient, sustainable and participatory practices:
Towards the GLAMs of the commons –
The outbreak of the pandemic created unprecedented challenges for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs), which were already struggling during the last years with issues of underfunding, increased maintenance and operational costs, and challenges imposed by over-tourism.
The COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call to rethink how cultural production and consumption are organized and articulated with different sets of actors and local contexts, towards safeguarding sustainability, access, and the well-being of the sector, its workforce, and surrounding communities.
Long before the pandemic crisis, European cultural policy encouraged museums to embrace participatory governance and digitalisation (European Commission, 2010), become more financially self-reliant, and diversify their income-generating activities.
It is thus vital to map pre-pandemic practices across the sector, to fully account for the pandemic effects on the sector, and to explore novel solutions that will inform GLAMs’ response and adaptation to the post-pandemic era, under a new conceptual paradigm that will advance GLAMs as the agents of change.
GLAMMONS project aims to provide answers to the above challenges, fill gaps, and advance research and policy employing the theory of the commons to
i) provide in-depth analysis and evaluation of ongoing shifts (with a specific focus on both pandemic-driven transformations and digitalisation) in the field of GLAMs,
ii) explore and assess practices (concerning management, finance, and participation) that emerge around small-scale, community-led GLAMs and the possibility of transferring relevant knowledge to more “established” and traditional ones to provide more sustainability to the sector.
Rooted in a track record of internationally recognized research excellence and world-leading practice, GLAMMONS will deliver an ambitious work programme, mainly through a novel conceptual approach:
the GLAMs of the commons.
To respond to this agenda, GLAMMONS will establish a transdisciplinary approach through which we will pursue two overarching major objectives and five specific scientific and policy objectives:
Develop new conceptualizations through the ways that the commons theory and practice can provide a new transformative power for the GLAMS and the local communities.
Produce evidence-based policy recommendations for more participatory and inclusive management and more efficient and resilient financing of the GLAMs through arrangements of the commons.
The figure below shows the ways in which the overarching major objectives connect with the specific scientific and policy objectives that lead to relevant work packages.
Figure: Major, Scientific and Policy Objectives of GLAMMONS:
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the European Research Executive Agency (REA) can be held responsible for them.
