Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development

Anita Kangas, Nancy Duxbury, Christiaan De Beukelaer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351025485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

The concept of sustainable development is commonly divided into environmental, economic, social and cultural dimensions. While a variety of international actors have declared the importance of culture in sustainable development, jointly articulating this clearly has been difficult. For example, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 contained only the most fleeting mention of culture. None of the SDGs referred directly to the case for integrating culture into sustainable development planning and decision-making. The role of cultural policy has remained unclear.

This book contributes to a better understanding of the role of culture in achieving sustainability, focusing on the particular roles for cultural policy in this context. Cultural sustainability is conceptualised as the sustainability of cultural and artistic practices and patterns, and to the role of cultural traits and actions to inform and compose part of the pathways towards more sustainable societies. The links between culture and sustainable development are analysed in ways that articulate and contemplate different roles for cultural policy. The contributors take up the concerns and perspectives of international, national, and local authorities and actors, illuminating ways in which these multi-scale efforts both intersect and diverge.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Culturally sustainable development: theoretical concept or practical policy instrument?

David Throsby

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, and considers the evolution of efforts to integrate culture into sustainable development policy and practice over recent years. The specific concept of culturally sustainable development (CSD), first promulgated more than 20 years ago, is re-assessed in the light of contemporary circumstances as a theoretically plausible proposition and as a basis for application to cultural policy formation. The paper proposes a set of principles by which consistency of a cultural policy or cultural development strategy with CSD can be judged. The application of each of the principles is discussed, drawing illustrations from particular policy areas in both developed and developing countries. The paper argues that CSD is a concept that has both theoretical substance and potential for practical policy application.

1. Introduction

Over the 30 years since the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development were articulated by the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development, usage of these terms in the political discourse has become so ubiquitous and applied in so many different circumstances that they are in danger of losing any semblance of meaning.¹ It is true that sustainability as an overarching paradigm within which to interpret biological and social interdependencies, and sustainable development as a specific application of this paradigm to processes of development, are well-established concepts. Moreover, their extension to embrace the role of culture in human affairs would appear to be well understood. Indeed so much has been written in recent times about culture in the context of sustainable development – or sustainable development in the context of culture – that it might be thought that all aspects of the field have been thoroughly ploughed and there is nothing left to say. Yet arguments in favour of a role for culture in sustainable development signally failed to impress the architects of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals which were adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, as we shall discuss further below. Furthermore there remains some disconnect between the theory of sustainable development and of culture’s role in it on the one hand, and practical policy strategies to secure development that is culturally sustainable on the other. Thus there are a number of issues in this vast territory that warrant further investigation, as this paper seeks to demonstrate.

In particular, it is unclear how proposals for the introduction of culture into the sustainable development discourse can be rationalised against more general sustainability models whose concerns are primarily environmental, economic and/or social. One possibility for resolving this disjunction is the articulation of a concept for the integration of culture in development that is specifically founded on the same basic principles that underlie other formal approaches to sustainability. Such a concept, which can be referred to as culturally sustainable development (CSD), was first promulgated more than 20 years ago, but has not been explored in detail, either theoretically or in regard to its possible relevance to the formation of cultural policy. There is a pre-history to this concept in the debate about what came to be known as ecologically sustainable development, an idea sufficiently precise for it to have become an element of public policy formation in a number of countries in the 1990s and beyond. So the following question arises: Are there any lessons in this experience that might enable us to decide whether or not CSD could eventually become similarly operational?

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First we provide a brief outline of ESD and how it migrated from the laboratory to the policy-making table. Second we aim to clarify and consolidate the theoretical basis of CSD. Finally we ask whether the concept of CSD could be interpreted as providing a guideline for integrating culture into sustainable development in the years ahead. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 the background to the emergence of sustainability as a framework for interpreting development processes is briefly outlined, and in Section 3 we discuss the ways in which culture became incorporated into this discourse. A formal statement of the principles of CSD is given in Section 4, followed by a consideration of how CSD can be interpreted in the context of cultural policy formation. We do so by demonstrating the application of each of the principles to cultural policy issues that arise in both developed and developing countries. Section 6 looks at three areas of current concern: culture in the UN’s post-2015 development agenda, alternatives to maximising economic growth as an objective in sustainable development policy, and a possible role for the private sector in implementing the principles of CSD. The paper concludes with some speculations about the future.

2. Emerging paradigms

The origins of the concept of sustainable development are well known.² During the 1960s and 1970s widespread concerns were expressed at the negative environmental consequences of unrestrained economic growth. Books such as Carson (1962) and Mishan (1967), followed by the report of the Club of Rome on The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), focussed these concerns, leading eventually to the establishment of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). The Commission argued that poverty and lack of development in the global South was directly linked to exploitative resource use in the industrialised world, and that sustainability could be seen as an overarching paradigm enabling integration of the biosphere and the economy in a system-wide interpretation of development processes. In this context, the concept of sustainable development was seen as encapsulating the desirable features of a development path which would ‘meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987, 43). It was a concept that combined the ideas of sustainable economic development, meaning development that will not slow down or wither away but that will be in some sense self-perpetuating, with that of sustainable environmental development, meaning the preservation and enhancement of a range of environmental values upon which life on this planet depends. The sustainable development framework articulated by the Commission

provided a basis on which the international community and national governments around the world could strive to reconcile the relentless drive for economic growth with the burgeoning problems of managing the air, land, biological and water resources for which they were responsible. (Harris and Throsby 1997, 1–2)

Not surprisingly, given the genesis and remit of the WCED, the focus of national and international policy interest arising from the Commission’s recommendations was on dealing with pressing environmental issues. The outcomes of the so-called Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992, five years after the publication of Our Common Future, demonstrated this environmental orientation very clearly. This meeting of world leaders, which was convened to assess progress in implementing sustainable development precepts at the international level, generated several significant achievements, including a Framework Convention on Climate Change, a Convention on Biological Diversity, and a programme of action entitled Agenda 21 (United Nations 1997). Despite the concentration on environmental issues in the WCED, the interpretation of what it saw as a desirable development path was placed within a whole-systems framework linking biological, social and economic components in a single holistic model, the sort of interdependent-systems model characteristic of the science of ecology. Hence the term ecologically sustainable development (ESD) became accepted as the appropriate terminology to describe the way forward, widening the range of concern to include social and economic phenomena as well as purely environmental aspects.³

The report of the WCED threw down a significant challenge to the world to take action, and a number of countries responded by adopting ESD as a framework for implementing the Commission’s recommendations.⁴ But this was not a straightforward process. As an objective for public policy, ESD was a diverse and multi-faceted concept whose achievement could not be interpreted with reference to a single measurable goal, in contrast to other policy goals such as maximising economic growth or minimising unemployment, where single metrics provide an immediate and easily interpretable indicator. Sustainable development, like some other phenomena in the public policy arena such as security, justice, equity and freedom of expression, tends to be more readily noticeable when absent. So although the Brundtland definition of sustainable development quoted above provided an apparently clear directive, neither it nor any other of many similar definitions could be regarded as providing a workable basis for comprehensive policy determination.

A number of approaches to operationalizing sustainable development could be suggested. An obvious one is to disaggregate the concept into its component elements, enabling a general overarching framework to be distiled into a set of more specific propositions. In the case of ESD, this approach was adopted in Australia in a policy process initiated by the Australian Government in 1990–1991, three years after the publication of the Brundtland Report.⁵ The process identified six principles of ESD that emerged from the WCED’s deliberations (Hamilton and Throsby 1997, 7). In brief these principles were:

• improving material and non-material wellbeing

• improving intergenerational equity

• improving intragenerational equity

• maintaining biodiversity

• dealing cautiously with risk, uncertainty and irreversibility

• accounting for interconnectedness between systems.

In the Australian process these principles were applied to a series of nine industries to determine in each case whether the industry could be described as ecologically sustainable, and if not, what policy measures might be applied to remedy particular deficiencies.⁶ It can be seen that these principles are sufficiently broad-ranging as to encompass the so-called ‘three pillars’ of sustainability: economic, social and environmental, a model that corresponds to the ‘triple-bottom-line’ of corporate accounting. A number of other countries have developed sustainable development strategies that incorporate all or most of the above principles in one form or another.⁷

3. Enter culture

The success of the Brundtland Commission in mobilising world opinion about significant environmental and developmental problems at a global level and in stimulating national governments to take action prompted a proposal that a similar investigative process could be set up to do the same for culture. Accordingly, the World Commission on Culture and Development was established, and had its first meeting in March 1993 under the chairmanship of Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. The Report on its proceedings was published in 1995 under the title Our Creative Diversity, a title that echoed that of its predecessor (WCCD 1995). But the hope that it might generate a similar groundswell of opinion recognising culture’s place in discussion of serious developmental issues across the globe remained largely unrealised. The cultural ‘summit’ held in Stockholm in 1998, three years after the appearance of the Pérez de Cuéllar Report, failed to attract the level of presidential and ministerial attendance that was evident in the earlier Rio meeting (UNESCO 1998). Nevertheless the WCCD Report did at least succeed in laying the foundation for a gradually evolving debate on the role of culture in development, and on the importance of cultural diversity, matters that were taken up in the UNESCO World Cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: cultural policies for sustainable development
• 1. Culturally sustainable development: theoretical concept or practical policy instrument?
• 2. ‘Culture’, ‘sustainable development’ and cultural policy: a contrarian view
• 3. Cultural rights and their contribution to sustainable development: implications for cultural policy
• 4. Greening cultural policy
• 5. Cultural sustainability as a strategy for the survival of museums and libraries
• 6. Caretakers of the Earth: integrating Canadian Aboriginal perspectives on culture and sustainability into local plans
• 7. Cultural policies for sustainable development: four strategic paths
• Index