Green Mobility in Arts and Culture: Beyond the Dilemma? | ZMINA:Resilience Capacity Building

Aims

This capacity building session introduced green mobility as a concept that is far broader than the choice of transport — one that encompasses the contexts in which artists and cultural professionals operate, their reasons for travelling, and the impact of their activities both at their destination and within their home community upon return. Designed for cultural organisations working in or aspiring to international projects, the session aimed to equip participants with practical tools, funding knowledge, and stronger advocacy arguments, while acknowledging that green mobility looks fundamentally different depending on where in Europe — or beyond — an organisation is based.

The session aimed to help participants:

• Understand green mobility as a holistic concept that goes beyond the means of transportation
• Recognise the historic development of green mobility as a topic in the cultural sector and where it stands now
• Navigate the current funding landscape — which schemes address environmental sustainability, and which actually offer adapted financial support for greener travel
• Learn to use the decision-making tool developed by The Green Room for On the Move to evaluate whether and how to travel to any given event or meeting
• Understand the SHIFT eco-certification framework and green guidelines developed by On the Move and partner networks
• Learn from inspiring residency models that integrate environmental sustainability across content, duration, and means of transportation
• Strengthen advocacy arguments for sustainable mobility that are sensitive to different contexts and realities — including wartime, geographic isolation, and economic inequality
• Understand that green mobility requires collective responsibility from funders as much as from practitioners

Trainer

Marie Le Sourd has been Secretary General of On the Move — the international information and advocacy network for cultural mobility, with 94 members in 34 countries — since 2012. Prior to that, she worked for twelve years in Southeast Asia, first at the Asia-Europe Foundation in Singapore and then as Director of the French Cultural Centre in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She was elected Board member of Culture Action Europe in 2025. With over two decades of experience promoting fairer and more equitable mobility patterns, including a climate justice approach, she is one of the leading voices in Europe on the intersection of cultural mobility and environmental sustainability.

Content

The webinar was structured around five interconnected parts that follow the arc of the session: framing the question through opening provocations, tracing the field's historical development, surveying the current funding and standards landscape alongside practical tools and residency models, working through the decision-making tool in detail, and closing with a call for collective advocacy. Throughout, Marie wove together data, examples, and a frank acknowledgement of the tensions — political, financial, and ethical — that make green mobility a genuinely complex challenge for the cultural sector.

1. What Is Green Mobility?
2. How the Field Got Here
3. Funding, Standards and Residency Models
4. The Decision-Making Tool in Practice
5. Collective Responsibility and Advocacy

The session was held on May 13, 2026 in English.