Challenging the Resilience Narrative: Workforce Care and Sector Sustainability

Across many national contexts, museums are increasingly asked to demonstrate ‘resilience’ in the face of prolonged underfunding, staff shortages and workforce precarity, and successive global crises. This article critically examines how resilience is mobilised within museum policy and practice, and asks what it means to expect resilience from institutions and workers operating under long-term structural constraint. Drawing on ecological and systems-based understandings of resilience, we argue for a shift away from treating resilience as an individual responsibility, to instead theorise the concept as something collective, structural and grounded in learning and care.
Using the museum sector in Northern Ireland as a case study, the article combines analysis of policy and strategic documents with qualitative material from interviews and workshops involving museum professionals, funders and civil servants conducted between 2020 and 2025. While regionally specific, the challenges described, such as pressures on capacity, challenges of sustainability and the ongoing commitment of a highly skilled and motivated workforce, will be familiar across many museum contexts internationally.

We argue that supporting resilient museum practice requires recognising and investing in these existing strengths. Reframing resilience as an ongoing process of learning and adaptation foregrounds the importance of funding security, workforce wellbeing, and collaborative infrastructure across the museum ecosystem. By emphasising the social value professional expertise and future potential of museum work the article contributes to international conversations about sustainability, care and the long-term vitality of museums as places of meaningful and rewarding professional practice.