Sustainability and Responsibility

Sustainability and Responsibility Are the Foundation of Our Work

Issues of sustainability and responsibility, which help ensure that our cultures endure as a respectful and balanced part of humanity and of life on Earth, are an integral part of the museum’s work and guiding principles.

We are committed to social, environmental, and economic responsibility and expect the same commitment from our partners. These principles are reflected in our collection work, the services provided at our museum sites, and our exhibition and events programme. In recognition of our long-term efforts, the National Museum of Finland was awarded the EcoCompass environmental management certification in 2025.

Promoting cultural sustainability lies at the heart of the National Museum of Finland’s mission. This includes preserving and making visible cultural diversity, safeguarding cultural rights, and strengthening dialogue and tolerance between cultures. We seek to reinforce cultural practices that support environmental, social, and economic sustainability both locally and globally. We actively participate in international cooperation to advance sustainable development and responsibility through museum work.

As a state museum, we contribute to the implementation of international conventions and recommendations that have long supported sustainable development in our field. In particular, these include UNESCO and Council of Europe cultural heritage instruments:

• UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property(ulkoinen linkki)
• UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003)(ulkoinen linkki)
• UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural(ulkoinen linkki)
• UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society (2015)(ulkoinen linkki)
• ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums(ulkoinen linkki)

Examples of sustainable and responsible museum practice include the repatriation of collection objects to their communities of origin.

The most extensive of these was the return in 2021 of an historic Sámi collection of more than 2,000 objects to Sápmi and the Sámi Museum Siida, together with the ongoing collaboration associated with the repatriation process to promote Sámi culture and awareness of it.

In recent years, the National Museum of Finland has also carried out the following repatriations in cooperation with source communities:

• In 2025, a royal kataklé stool was returned to the Republic of Benin as part of the cultural heritage of the Kingdom of Dahomey.
• In 2023, fragments of the sacred power stone of the Ondonga Kingdom were returned to Namibia.

In 2020, the museum returned ancestral Pueblo remains from the Mesa Verde region, together with associated funerary objects, to the United States.