The Science Museum Group, which brings together some of the UK's leading science museums, had a rule for accepting money from oil and gas companies. Its sustainability policy says it works with funders that are on track to decarbonise, and to check this it uses an external index, the Transition Pathway Initiative. It requires companies that extract fossil fuels to reach level 4 for quality of climate management and to align over the long term with the 1.5-degree goal.
BP passed that test. According to Museums Journal, it was at level 5 and, as of June 2025, on track to align by 2050. Even so, on 31 August 2026 its sponsorship ended after almost twenty-five years, "at the end of the agreed term", and the museum gave no reason.
If the criterion had been enough to decide, BP would have stayed. It did not. The criterion alone did not explain the decision.
As well as measuring, the rule changed the question. It turned a hard question, whether a science museum should be funded with an oil company's money, into a much more manageable one: whether that company reaches a certain level on an index. The first is a question of values that obliges the institution to show its face. The second is answered by a third party, with a score.
That is the logic of regulatory compliance systems, whose function is to certify. They set a threshold and declare admissible everything that exceeds it. They can say no, and they did in 2024, when the same museum dropped the Norwegian oil company Equinor for failing to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement. But when they say yes, that yes can work as an institutional endorsement. The discussion shifts from whether the sponsorship is appropriate to whether the company meets parameters set in advance.
Meanwhile, according to Culture Unstained, the organisation that campaigns against these sponsorships, BP has dropped part of its climate targets, and the group forecasts that its score will fall in the next assessment. That forecast comes from an interested party. But it shows the underlying problem: a metric can take time to register what a company has already decided.
A museum lends its sponsor something a company cannot buy anywhere else: trust, prestige, an association with education, knowledge and the common good. A science museum also lends its authority to explain the world, including the climate. For that authority to accompany the name of an oil company is an unequal exchange: the company receives credibility, and the museum a share of its budget.
That is why culture and the arts should not lend their credit to the industry whose product is the main source of the emissions heating the planet. Cultural legitimacy is a scarce public good, and spending it on laundering the image of those who aggravate the crisis that culture itself tries to explain devalues it for everyone.
The Science Museum Group case shows that limit from the inside. Its rule served to justify continuity. When the relationship ended, the rule could not explain it, because by its measure BP was still an acceptable partner. Whatever moved the institution, it lay outside the index.
Culture Unstained speaks of years of pressure, of a boycott of school visits backed by a teaching union, and of unrest among staff. The museum has not confirmed any of these reasons.
The sector is divided. The British Museum signed a ten-year, £50 million agreement with BP in 2023, and in 2025 four British national museums, the Science Museum Group among them, signed a letter defending corporate sponsorship. That same year, the UK Museums Association ratified an ethical code that advises dropping sponsorships linked to environmental damage.
An index can say whether a company clears a threshold. It cannot say whether a museum should lend it its name.
On the open conversation
This text continues the Notebook's line of inquiry into the conditions under which institutions legitimise themselves, now from the standpoint of the money that funds them. It draws on information published by Museums Journal and The Art Newspaper, and separates what the sources say from my own reading. If you work in museum management, sponsorship ethics or access-to-information law and can contribute a piece of data, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Museums Association, "Science Museum ends BP sponsorship after 25 years", 1 September 2026.
Culture Unstained, "Science Museum drops oil sponsor BP after mounting pressure on controversial partnership", 28 August 2026 (campaign organisation, interested party).