Sustainable Pathways for Cultural and Creative Industries: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have always been integral to sustainable development, be it local, regional, or global, and now their contribution is recognized as such, as sustainability has begun to receive steady attention and become part of long-term strategies for companies, countries, and institutions. CCIs’ relationship to sustainability, however, is intricate and multifaceted. Their oeuvre (the cultural product) contributes to sustainable societies in its own right and, at the same time, through the respective companies’ sustainable practices and their contribution to economic output and growth. This makes research at the intersection of these areas particularly complex and fragmented, difficult to comprehensively explore, in part due to the specificities of each CCI and their knottiness as a whole. This study aims to chart the research at the intersection of sustainability and CCIs and to determine whether cultural sustainability emerges as a separate fourth pillar within the sustainability pillars framework. To achieve this, a set of bibliometric analyses has been done using Bibliometrix, including keyword co-occurrence network analysis, thematic mapping, and thematic evolution. The findings reveal the presence of the core sustainability pillars (environmental, social, and economic) and, indeed, the emergence of a fourth pillar in the form of cultural sustainability, which, however, seems to be in an infant phase, starting to develop and not very strongly delimited from the social sustainability pillar yet. Cultural heritage also emerges as a central conceptual axis between sustainability and CCIs, comprising the most intense and mature level of research. Temporal and more detailed thematic patterns are also assessed. Overall, the conceptual landscape reveals somewhat scattered research patterns, calling for more integrated and up-to-date theoretical frameworks, as well as empirical research on CCIs’ position within sustainable development structures. Insights from this study could serve as a comprehensive theoretical basis for such empirical investigations. By drawing a panoptic picture of the development of this topic over time, it also offers solid support for the analysis and rethinking of frameworks for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.