As museum security has entered public discourse, it seemed necessary to revisit the issue of risks, their plurality, and their interconnectedness. In 2018, ICOM France already dedicated a debate evening to this question. Titled "Facing Risks, How Can Museums Improve Their Organization?", the discussion highlighted the major risks museums were then confronting. Reading these proceedings today attests to the evolving nature of threats and the need for regular assessment to build an effective strategy tailored to each museum ecosystem.
In recent years, museum professionals have seen the range of dangers to anticipate widen. While natural disasters, fires, terrorism, and theft remain points of vigilance, other issues, driven by globalized news, have become part of our daily lives: a rapidly transforming climate questioning museum opening conditions and collection conservation, further accentuating fire or flood risks, activist actions within exhibition spaces, armed conflicts on our borders, and pressures from a variety of actors. It is clear that in a short time, the risk map for museums has expanded and become more complex. Prevention has become an absolute necessity.
How, then, can institutions position their policies in the face of a shifting and composite reality, different from one place to another? How can we move from a "one problem at a time" logic to a matrix-based, agile strategy that considers threats as a set of indicators for each institution to evaluate and better anticipate? How can the precautionary principle be balanced with responses that continue to allow museums to fulfill their essential missions of public access, broad dissemination, and collection conservation?
Acknowledging that museums are vulnerable is not an admission of powerlessness; it is recognizing the sometimes contradictory nature of certain missions and learning to think through this complexity responsibly, by anticipating rather than succumbing, and by integrating a risk culture linked to the specificity of what makes a museum. Today, the capacity for foresight and the need to act, which involves convincing all stakeholders in the decision-making and implementation chain (from policymakers to field agents), are governance issues based on professional ethics.
Indeed, faced with sometimes contradictory injunctions, the role of museum professionals, torn between the need to display, the obligation to conserve, the duty of sobriety, and strong social expectations of exemplarity, is increasingly complicated. Dialogue among all stakeholders is therefore essential to outline the contours of threats, affirm lines of responsibility, inform about new practices, and establish a roadmap to counter these risks.
Is thinking about and sharing this risk map, adapted to each institution based on its weaknesses and strengths, not the path to take to implement a responsible, honest, and ethical institutional strategy, aligned with the museum's narrative? This was emphasized by Émilie Girard, president of ICOM France.
The debate evening, held online via Zoom, featured contributions from figures such as Claire Barbillon, director of the École du Louvre; Alain Chevallier (vice-president of Bouclier Bleu France); Robert Blaizeau and Cédric Polet (directors of the museums of the Rouen Normandie metropolis); Murielle Barbier (director of heritage and collections at the Château de Fontainebleau); Camille Kirk (director of sustainable development strategy at the J. Paul Getty Trust); and Sébastien Tison (advisor for education, early childhood, culture, and sport at France Urbaine). Moderation was provided by Hélène Vassal, director of collection support at the Louvre Museum.
