Sustainable Entrepreneurship in the Cultural and Creative Sector: Contextualisation, Challenges and Prospects - Editorial to the Special Issue

Over the last two decades, the academic and policy interest in cultural entrepreneurship (DiMaggio, 1982) has increasingly focused on the culture-sustainable development framework, which emerged primarily as a reaction to a radically changing context that was populated by a series of crises –economic, social, and environmental. Awareness of the contribution of cultural and creative entrepreneurship, in economic, social and cultural terms to sustainability has been related to the broader discussions of culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development and to the idea that culture is pervasive in the sustainable development paradigm (CHCfE, 2015; Duxbury, Cullen, and Pascual, 2012; Soini and Dessein, 2016; Throsby, 2010; UCLG, 2010; Yildrim et al., 2019; Borin and Donato, 2022). The attention to cultural entrepreneurship was initially on financial and economic sustainability, due to the sector’s inherent fragility and exposure to external economic shocks and budgetary policy. Recently, research emerged on how the sector is pursuing sustainability approaches in its practices and per se. Cultural entrepreneurs have become more aware of the importance of promoting entrepreneurial practices that meet the criteria of social, economic and environmental sustainability and started to include these dimensions in their value chains, business models and financial and non-financial reports (Borin and Donato, 2022). This special issue draws on these complementary perspectives, presenting papers that reflect the changing research and policy scenario and stimulate a constructive debate on sustainability in cultural and creative entrepreneurship.