Our Stories of Change
This article is a collaboration between On the Move and European Theatre Convention.
When Mag. Alexander Matthias Kosnopfl joined Volkstheater Wien as business controller and sustainability manager in February 2023, the theatre's environmental journey was already underway — but still finding its shape. Three years on, with an Austrian Umweltzeichen eco-label in hand and thanks to the European Theatre Convention’s membership, he describes an institution moving from isolated fixes towards a more structural approach — one that a modest but highly relevant grant from the European Theatre Convention (ETC) has helped push forward.
Starting from the basics
Volkstheater Wien's sustainability efforts began in earnest in 2022–2023, focused first on the fundamentals: water and energy savings, and a closer look at how the theatre travels. Kosnopfl points to a new internal rule restricting travel beyond 500 kilometres — though he notes the constraint rarely bites in practice, since most performers and directors already come from nearby Germany and Austria. The theatre's central Vienna location also works in its favour, served by multiple subway, tram and bus lines, even if precise CO2 figures for public transport use are still being worked out, including at the city-level (eg. Vienna).
That groundwork led to the 2024 Umweltzeichen certification — a long-established Austrian quality label, originally created by the Ministry of Economy for high-quality products. Under the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK), it only recently extended to theatres and cinemas. The label requires renewal every four years, with audits tracking the institution's progress. Other European countries, Kosnopfl notes, are now looking at adopting something similar.
What the ETC grant made possible
It's against this backdrop that Volkstheater Wien applied for the ETC Sustainable Theatre Grant. The European Theatre Convention has been active on the environmental sustainability’s subject while targeting the network to be climate neutral by 2030. To achieve this goal, ETC uses a variety of programmes and tools, including the ETC Theatre Green Book and the more recent ETC Collaboration Development Grant for Sustainable Theatre, which offers six grants of €4,500 each to support ETC member theatres in developing collaborative projects towards climate neutrality. The ETC Sustainable Theatre Grant is designed to support flexible, creative collaborations among member theatres putting aspects of the Theatre Green Book (TGB) into practice — whether in their buildings, productions or day-to-day operations. Overall, ETC has been striving for a 360-degree approach to change, combining tailor-made tools, dedicated online and/or on-site training support, and this more recent seed support grant.
Kosnopfl is careful to frame this €4,500 grant in relative terms: "It's not about the amount," he explains; the money was less a budget line than a catalyst, a small push that made a specific meeting possible.
That meeting — an awareness event planned on 14 October 2026 at the theatre's rehearsal centre in Vienna — will bring together three ETC members: Volkstheater Wien, Örkény István Theatre in Budapest and the Wiener Festwochen festival. The focus will be squarely on management, spanning technical, business and artistic departments, though the two directors behind the theatre's zero-waste productions have also been invited to share their experience directly. The Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, a German climate think tank, will join to present SAPA[1], a self-assessment tool that lets performing arts organisations evaluate their sustainability progress department by department.
The event sits within Volkstheater's participation in the Green Stage European project, running through 2027, and its two zero-waste productions planned for 2026–2027 — productions built to track and reuse every material that goes on stage. It's a deliberately more demanding bar than what Kosnopfl sees elsewhere in the sector. Where many theatres claim sustainability credentials on the strength of measures like LED lighting, he argues the harder, more structural work — legal and safety constraints included, since fireproofing and certification rules often force new purchases regardless of intent — is where real change has to happen. Such types of European convenings, with a more holistic and neutral approach, based on peer-to-peer learning can also help internally for people and departments’ representatives to exchange and to pave the way towards more systemic types of change.
That pattern is not unique to Volkstheater Wien. In a companion Stories of Change interview, Francesca Venturi of Ravenna Teatro — Centro di Produzione, an ETC theatre approaching its first Theatre Green Book self-certification round in Riga in November 2025, reached a similar conclusion: individual theatres can green their buildings and productions, but sustainable touring depends on infrastructure no single theatre controls, from electric vans to charging points. Her answer echoes Kosnopfl's — networking with peer theatres to shift the wider system together, rather than trying to solve it alone.
[1] The Sustainability Assessment for the Performing Arts (SAPA) tool is a dialogue-based self-assessment instrument that supports cultural institutions in promoting the sustainable development of their organisations. By encouraging open dialogue and participation across all levels and departments, the tool fosters ideas and strategies in four key areas: Economy, Ecology, Social Responsibility, and Community, Culture & Communication.
Why partnership, not just funding
For Kosnopfl, the value of this ETC-supported project lies less in the grant itself than in what it enables: a shared space for theatres to compare notes, and a network effect that no single institution can build alone. He is already thinking beyond the October meeting, describing plans for a network of sustainability managers across Austrian theatres to address common challenges together — echoing a similar existing initiative he's part of, the Netzwerk Nachhaltigkeit, a German-Austrian sustainability network that convenes three times a year to keep the exchange between theatres alive.
That ambition has, in fact, already taken institutional shape. Writing separately about NÖTIG — Nachhaltige Österreichische Theater- und Opernschaffende in Gemeinschaft — a network founded by representatives of Bühnen Graz, Volkstheater Wien, the Bundestheater-Holding, the Austrian Theatre Technology Society and the Salzburg Festival[2], Kosnopfl describes an alliance built to pool practical knowledge across Austria's stages: shared approaches to material reuse, smarter production processes and circular procurement, structured to outlast any single person's involvement. His argument there echoes what he tells ETC — that cooperation, not competition, is what lets a whole sector move forward together — though he adds that theatres still need clearer regulatory signals, on procurement rules, material standards and reporting requirements, before circular measures can be planned with confidence rather than improvised.
That instinct comes with a warning attached. Kosnopfl is blunt about his concern that current sustainability efforts across the sector are often insufficient — and that genuine progress means going further than surface-level gestures, towards ideas like circular economy practices integrated into how productions are built. It's a shift ETC has been tracking elsewhere in its own network: in the STAGES Sustainable Theatre casebook, the Slovene National Theatre Maribor frames its transition around three steps — reduce, source sustainably, and reuse or recycle — as a practical companion to the Theatre Green Book's guidelines. As the casebook notes, circularity is increasingly on the agenda for theatres, though progress is often slowed by patchy technical knowledge of materials' environmental impact and by the discovery that much of what is already in use is difficult to recycle — a gap Maribor is addressing by building a digitally managed inventory of its costumes and textiles, known as the fundus[2].
Kosnopfl's account suggests Volkstheater Wien is reaching for the same rigor, building reuse and material tracking into productions from the design stage rather than retrofitting it once a show is already built.
[2] Article provided by Mag. Alexander Matthias Kosnopfl: ‘KREISLAUFKULTUR FÜR EINE ZUKUNFTSFÄHIGE THEATERWELT’.
[3] See page 62, Mapping the Impact of STAGES Theatres: How to Walk the Talk? in STAGES Sustainable Theatre casebook.
An uncertain policy backdrop
Kosnopfl credits the ETC's Theatre Green Book as a source of inspiration, but is candid that he hasn't seen much beyond it in terms of ETC-level sustainability action — and would welcome more structured exchange at a European scale. The concern is not abstract: he flags the risk that sustainability initiatives, including his own, could be squeezed by budget cuts within two or three years, at a moment when European, national and local green policy commitments are themselves wavering. The Culture Compass, the policy reference framework launched by the European Commission in November 2025 to strengthen EU cultural policies, includes, for instance, an environmental sustainability component — though this is more focused on buildings and heritage, risking a loss of sight of other key dimensions such as production, activities and touring.
The report ‘Creative Shifts’, which resulted from the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) group of EU Member State experts' work on the ‘Green transition of the cultural and creative sectors’ during 2024 and 2025 as part of the EU Work Plan for Culture 2023–2026, also reflects the lack of consistent funding support. The lack of funding is by far the most commonly cited barrier to greening across the sector, with only a minority of environment and climate ministries currently offering dedicated financing tools for culture. This leaves most of the burden on culture ministries alone. The report's central recommendation is to make sustainability funding structural rather than incidental by tying public support to environmental standards through 'eco-conditionality' — a concept already tested in Austrian and German film funding — and by allocating additional sustainability budgets specifically for culture, rather than diverting existing ones.
This tension, linked to the lack of systemic change, runs through the entire conversation. The tools, certifications and partnerships that the Volkstheater Wien has assembled represent real progress towards its ambition to be carbon neutral by 2030. However, Kosnopfl's account suggests that achieving this goal depends less on any individual grant and more on whether the kind of structural, cross-border collaboration that the ETC has begun to facilitate can endure in a political climate that is turning away from it. This is what the ETC is striving for through its multidimensional approach to supporting members. This approach leaves room for experimentation with new formats of (artistic) encounter that can be small-scale but with a potential high impact for change.
Article by Marie Le Sourd (Secretary General, On the Move), based on an interview with Alexander Matthias Kosnopfl on 20 July 2026. With the support of AI for editing and formatting.
Cover photo: 'Fräulein Else' at Volkstheater Wien (c) Marcel Urlaub