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Some governments responsible for multiple museums have established museum systems, adding an administrative layer in the form of a national, provincial, civic, or state museums authority, in the hope of obtaining efficiencies of scale due to the centralization of such services as conservation, documentation, purchasing, security, accounting, or human resources. One result is often the erection of a non-public building in which many of these support functions can be maintained. Singapore’s Heritage Conservation Centre in Jurong is an outstanding example, which our company, Lord Cultural Resources, helped to plan. The individual museums, which usually retain their specific curatorial, education, and exhibition departments, may struggle to assert their identities in such a system, but in general these disadvantages are outweighed by the gains in efficiency due to centralization of other functions. In the case of Singapore, these include the Singapore Art Museum, the Singapore History Museum, and the Asian Civilization Museum, all of which benefit from the storage, conservation, and documentation services of the state-of-the-art Centre in Jurong; the entire complex is governed by the government-appointed National Heritage Board, which is currently proceeding with the renovation and expansion of two heritage buildings into a new National Gallery of Singapore.

Further complexity in governance can arise when the museum is part of a cultural complex. A cultural district may be simply an area within a city where a number of independent cultural attractions are located; or it may be a deliberately planned complex, as on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island in the United Arab Emirates, or in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and the National Zayed Museum are currently under construction on Saadiyat Island, with a Maritime Museum also planned, while at West Kowloon a multidisciplinary museum named M+ is planned, along with an exhibition center and a range of performing arts venues.

The governance of each component of a complex – which may individually be line departments, “arm’s length” institutions, not-for-profit organizations, or private sector attractions – may need to be planned in relation to a central authority for the complex, if there is to be one. The concern is to respect the independence of each constituent while realizing advantages due to their association, such as common marketing, joint purchasing, security, or in some cases shared facilities. Our company has assisted with both the Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong projects, where final decisions as to governance are still under consideration, as government agencies – the Tourism Development and Investment Corporation (TDIC) of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong – serve as at least interim, possibly longer-term governance for these developing projects.

Collaboration to realize advantages of scale can even be negotiated among the governing bodies of long-standing independent institutions. Several years ago our firm helped the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Cleveland Botanic Garden, and the Western Reserve Historical Society, all of which were independent not-for-profit associations located in one sector of Cleveland’s Museum Circle, to form the Cleveland Cultural Collaborative, aimed at achieving efficiencies of scale by combining purchasing, support staff, and services where possible.

Still another governance challenge arises for museums that are also responsible for colleges or schools. Every variety of relationship may be observed here: from the complete integration of staff appointments where curators are also professors at the American Museum of Natural History and its graduate school in New York; over to complete separation, as at the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum, which founded the school that became the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1909 but separated from it in 1994, with the college relocating four years later so that the museum could expand. Even where the museum and the school are in the same building or physically connected, as at the Art Institute of Chicago, museum and college may have separate governance. At the time of writing our firm was working with the Corcoran Gallery and College of Art and Design¹ in Washington, DC, which formerly had separate boards for each, but for some years now has been trying to administer both gallery and college with the board of one independent not-for-profit association. State or provincial university museums in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere can often simplify these relationships, since both college and museum usually report as line departments to a central university board or senate. Such university museums often benefit by receiving allocations that are part of a much larger state education budget.

Whether operating independently or as part of a larger system, however, government line department museums around the world too often suffer from cutbacks in funding, inadequate programming resources, virtually no acquisition budgets, and top-down administrations that may be ill-informed about or indifferent to the museum’s needs. Such an institution has great difficulty answering the call to participate as an economic generator of cultural tourism, or even as an educational resource. As a result, the past few decades have seen a worldwide trend toward setting many government line department museums at a distance sufficient to facilitate other means of revenue generation – creating the second common governance type, often called “arm’s-length” museums.