The Missing Engine of the Green Revolution: Why Culture is Not a Luxury—It’s Our Only Hope

 

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We are currently sleepwalking toward climate tipping points, armed with spreadsheets, carbon taxes, and technical targets. Governments and industries treat the climate crisis as a math problem—a grim equation of parts-per-million, gigatonnes of emissions, and projected GDP losses.

But there is a fatal flaw in this technocratic approach: it fails to make a new future feel possible.

Economics can tell us why we must act, but it cannot make us want to. It cannot build the collective desire necessary to overhaul the way we live, work, and connect. For that, we need a different kind of infrastructure. As Mariana Mazzucato argues in her landmark 2026 policy brief, Climate Change and Culture, the arts and cultural sector is not a peripheral decoration to the economy; it is the essential social architecture required for a just transition.

The Great Miscalculation: Culture as a Cost

For too long, policy makers have viewed culture as an expenditure—a line item to be slashed in times of fiscal constraint. This is a profound error of logic. If we want to change the trajectory of our civilization, we must first change the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we value.

Technocratic solutions may be the tools of the transition, but culture provides the meaning. Without the ability to imagine a sustainable life—one that is vibrant, inclusive, and deeply human—the transition to net-zero will always feel like a sacrifice rather than a liberation.

Four Shifts Toward a New Economic Reality

To bridge this gap, Mazzucato proposes four radical shifts that move culture from the fringes of policy to the very heart of economic strategy:

Directing Growth, Not Just Measuring It: We must pivot toward an economy that prioritizes creativity, inclusivity, and sustainability. Culture provides the roadmap for what this "better" growth actually looks like, moving us beyond sterile GDP metrics toward a vision of human flourishing.

Building Legitimacy from the Bottom Up: Climate policy cannot be top-down, mandate-heavy, and detached from the daily struggles of citizens. We must empower communities to shape policy through their lived experience, using cultural expression to weave policy into the fabric of local identities.

Recognizing Culture as Essential Infrastructure: Just as we invest in high-speed rail, power grids, and digital networks, we must recognize theaters, galleries, and community creative spaces as critical national infrastructure. These are the places where the social "connective tissue" of society is built and maintained.

Funding Culture as Investment: It is time to retire the "cost-cutting" mindset. We need "creative bureaucracies"—new forms of governance that act as partners in co-creation, investing in culture with the understanding that the return on investment is a more resilient, imaginative, and cohesive society.

The Future is a Collective Act of Imagination

The cost of inaction is catastrophic, but the cost of an uninspired transition is stagnation. To survive the climate crisis, we do not just need better technology; we need a cultural renaissance.

We are standing at a precipice, and the transition ahead will be one of the most complex challenges in human history. We can attempt to solve it through policy white papers alone, or we can embrace the power of the arts to build the legitimacy, the hope, and the shared vision that can carry us through the turbulence of change.

The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we build together. It’s time we treated our cultural life not as a luxury to be enjoyed after we solve the crisis, but as the very engine that will get us there.

This article is based on the 2026 policy brief, "Climate Change and Culture: Reimagining an Inclusive, Sustainable and Creative Future," authored by Professor Mariana Mazzucato for the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

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