Each year’s International Museum Day theme is proposed by ICOM’s network and aims to promote museum issues within society.  

The theme of the 2016 event is Museums and Cultural Landscapes.  

A combination of both nature and history, a cultural landscape is a changing and constantly evolving territory, the product of a specific geological identity and transformations made by time and people. Both individuals and communities are responsible for protecting and enhancing these landscapes.  

These tasks also fall under the duty of museums, which hold objects and items that serve as both material and intangible legacies of territories both large and small.  

The theme Museums and Cultural Landscapes makes museums responsible for their landscapes, asking them to contribute knowledge and expertise and take an active role in their management and upkeep. The primary mission of museums is to oversee heritage, whether it be inside or outside their walls. Their natural vocation is to expand their mission and implement their own activities in the open field of cultural landscape and heritage that surrounds them and for which they can assume varying degrees of responsibility.  

The vision of a museum engaged primarily in conserving, exhibiting and communicating about its own collections is being replaced by another that is more respectful of the nature of an institution that also conducts research and produces, acquires, develops and shares knowledge of the surrounding territory and provides the communities who live there with a different way of looking at their landscape. By assuming responsibilities that are not limited to their collections, they are also encouraged to expand, enhance and increase their collections and their heritage of knowledge and expertise.  

Highlighting the link between museums and cultural heritage enhances the idea of museums as territorial centres involved in actively protecting the cultural landscape.

Because they are responsible for the surrounding landscape, museums’ missions also include the protection and conservation of the environmental heritage, in order to promote the respectful development of its identity, working jointly and in collaboration with all entities – both public and private – that hold a variety of interests in that heritage. At the same time, a museum that is responsible for its landscape assumes its role as a centre for interpreting the surrounding heritage and territory, by promoting its knowledge and making residents and visitors aware of the values on which they are built and by asking them to participate in their conservation, promotion and enhancement.  

By their very nature, landscapes are constantly evolving and cannot be frozen or made into museums. Protecting and conserving them prevents these transformations from destroying, deforming or degrading their identity. Museums can make a significant contribution to the administration of a territory that respects the value of its landscape, in the form of knowledge about the territory, its heritage and its landscape, through the protection, conservation and interpretation of cultural heritage both inside and outside their walls, through active participation in public and urban policies, and through the definition and implementation of landscape policies.