30 DISCUSSION ON INDIVIDUAL OR COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY Rodney Harrison I am going to answer this question by introducing the project Reimagining Museums for Climate Action*. Reimagining Museums for Climate Action began life as an ideas’ competition where we invited members of the public, anyone who is not really involved in the museum sector ordinarily, to tell us how they think museums would need to change to help them – both as individuals and as collectives – to take the kinds of climate action they might wish to take. We launched the project in May 2020 for International Museums’ Day, and we received around 250 proposals from 50 different countries. We worked with a shortlist of 80 people and collectives that developed proposals to put together a website and an exhibition which we curated for COP26 in Glasgow, at the Glasgow Science Centre. We have also produced a book and a toolkit for museums out of this work. The project was led by myself and my colleague Colin Sterling from the University of Amsterdam, working in close partnership with Henry McGhie from Curating Tomorrow. The project was developed to address the part of the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that has to do with the responsibility of institutions and educators to facilitate public participation in climate action, generally known as Action for Climate Empowerment, or ACE. The Glasgow Work Programme on Action for Climate Empowerment particularly emphasises the role of museums and other cultural institutions (also universities) in facilitating action for climate, as did the previous one, known as the Doha Work Programme on Action for Climate Empowerment (see further discussion in Henry McGhie’s book Action for Climate Empowerment. A guide for galleries, libraries, museums and archives). What emerged in the competition is that many participants focused on the need to communicate and facilitate the understanding of the impacts of climate change on individuals and communities across the globe to motivate collective action for climate. This action must take on board the perspectives of a range of different actors and constituents, not just those of human beings but also of non-human actors and agents. The competition invited us and the participants to think about how climate change affects individuals and collectives in different places around the world and how we can understand the experiences of climate change whilst also speculating on how climate will affect humans and non-humans in the future. In answer to the question, I do not see it as particularly helpful to place individual and collective action in opposition to one another, but, instead, I would like to emphasise that these different forms of action are not mutually exclusive; cultural institutions have this responsibility to facilitate individual as well as collective climate action. Alessandra Bonazza Surely both individual and collective involvement and responsibility should be taken into consideration and one approach should not exclude the other. Awareness-raising and active citizen involvement are very important processes that can contribute to putting cultural heritage at the centre of attention in the fight against climate change. Regeneration, safeguarding and protecting cultural heritage have only recently been recognised as fundamental actions for increasing society’s resilience to climate change. As a researcher, I see the communication of the results as a key step and I believe that in communicating outcomes we need to work on the communication process itself; I think that what is needed is a co-creative approach (and this is what we
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