Artists and Cultural Professionals As Environmental Activists? Developing Strategies and Actions Addressing Environmental Issues in the MENA Region

In a world characterised by increasing global flows, mobility is closely related to citizenship considering that freedom of movement is viewed as a condition to promote citizens’ full participation in public life (Le Breton, 2021). As any social fact, mobility is heavily impacted by a number of social and geo-political constraints. This is especially true in the MENA region, where access to mobility is among the most restricted ones at the global level (UNESCO, 2019).

In this context, adding environmental considerations to mobility adds an extra layer to the burdensome reality of the region’s citizens: if mobility is considered a major contributor to CO2 emissions, how to go about reconciling mobility with environmental citizenship? Restricting the debate to the carbon footprint of travel leads to a dead-end when infrastructures offer no alternative to planes. At another level, the injunction to renounce (Monnin, 2023) mobility highlights the power of those who can decide who should renounce to what. This debate is particularly sensitive for artists and cultural operators based in the MENA region, whose capacity to move internationally is instrumental to pursue their career.

Sheller’s perspective (2018) offers a robust framework to rethink this debate, mobilising climate justice to craft a new mobility paradigm based on human rights, fairness and equity, and calling for a collective work to define the rules and norms that should govern access to it. Inspired by this theoretical framework, as well as post-colonial literature challenging Western “green” approaches (Hamouchène & al, 2023), our empirical research analyses artists’ and cultural operators’ strategies to address mobility and climate change in the MENA region using EU and other donors’ resources through cooperation projects and participatory processes to reinforce cultural ecosystems, as well as new narratives stemming from their artistic work, in a bid to contribute to environmental citizenship.