Introduction: Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development

In public policy-making at the national, regional, and local levels of government, the relation between cultural policy and sustainable development is highly topical, albeit under-researched. The recognition of this link is essential and could revitalize a new role for cultural actors (including arts, heritage, and socio-cultural activities) at all levels and potentially transform the politics of cultural policy. This special issue aims to advance the formation of principles for a new approach to culture and sustainability in the strategies of cultural policies.

The articles assembled in this special issue aim to address the question of how cultural policy/ies can contribute to sustainable development trajectories. The special issue brings international perspectives to this issue, presenting complementary frameworks of interpretation and considering different organizational levels and therefore different types of actors. The contributions to this special issue build on the multiple paths through which discussions about culture and sustainable development have emerged and travelled, and aim to identify attributes for clarifying and linking the debates more tightly to cultural policy.

Sustainable development has long conceptual roots, and international organisations have played a significant role in contesting the meaning of the term and the content of the dominant discourses. The term first came into prominence in 1980, when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources presented the ‘World Conservation Strategy’ with ‘the overall aim of achieving sustainable development through the conservation of living resources.’

The Brundtland Commission Report (WCED 1987) then significantly launched it forward by emphasizing the importance of sustainable development with a much wider scope of meaning, and in effect forcing it to the top of the agenda of the United Nations and the multilateral development banks. In its approach, there was no single focus (or object) of sustainable development but, instead, it asserted that all the economic, social, and environmental systems must be simultaneously sustainable. The Commission argued that perceived needs are socially and culturally determined, and sustainable development requires the promotion of values that encourage consumption standards that are within the bounds of the ecological possible and to which all can reasonably aspire. Paralleling the process that had led from the Brundtland Report to the Rio Summit (1992) and beyond, the World Commission on Culture and Development (WCCD) and UNESCO expanded from this discursive platform, promoting a new discussion about culture and development, and culturally sustainable development. The WCCD report (1995) linked cultural policy and sustainable development and connected culture to a range of economic, political, and societal issues. In this report, culture was defined broadly as ‘ways of living together’ and valued in ‘giving meaning to our existence’ (14). It was seen as having two roles: first, an instrumental role to promote economic progress, to integrate as an important dimension across all policy domains, and to add a cultural lens to all policy decisions; and second, a constituent role as a desirable end in itself, the characteristic of civilization that gives meaning to existence.

International organisations lay the foundations of their activities on four basic sources of legitimacy: rational-legal authority (their charters), delegated legitimacy (derived from states), moral legitimacy (their missions), and expert legitimacy (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). They are not consistent over time in their policy preferences because they are sensitive to a wide variety of influences and experts committed to competing ideas and paradigms. Ideas are accepted to provide guidance on institutional creation and reform to country-level policy actors. The international organisations’ mode of governance is indirect and is often called an orchestration (Abbott et al. 2015). In practice, an orchestrator (for example, UNESCO) works through intermediators, such as the third sector, business organisations, transgovernmental networks, and other international organisations. Intermediators collaborate voluntarily with an orchestrator because they share basic goals and value its material and ideational support. In many ways they all profit from each other when orchestration serves to create and enforce common rules for the conduct of states.

Scientists tend to divide the concept of sustainable development into multiple dimensions: environmental, economic, social, cultural, and sometimes others. This conceptual practice of compartmentalization has been widely criticized, with the main difficulty building on the paradox that all these elements are equally part of sustainability, yet political discourse typically does not allow for the layered complexity that is needed to inclusively tackle these issues. As such, the tendency to define different dimensions of sustainable development reinforces administrative and policy separation in practice.

The concepts and frameworks that have evolved to situate culture in sustainability contexts have demonstrated multidisciplinarity, substantial flexibility, and a widening plurality of approaches over time. Cultural sustainability tends to be defined in two ways. On one hand, it refers to the sustainability of cultural and artistic practices and patterns, including, for example, identity formation and expression, cultural heritage conservation, and a sense of cultural continuity. On the other hand, cultural sustainability also refers to the role of cultural traits and actions to inform and compose part of the pathways towards more sustainable societies. Culture lies at the core of practices and beliefs that can support or inspire the necessary societal transition to more sustainable living. These narratives, values, and actions contribute to the emergence of a more culturally sensitive understanding of sustainable development and to clarifying the roles of art, culture, and cultural policy in this endeavour.

A central issue with the concept of cultural sustainability is that so many researchers share it as a common goal, that it has become a political catchword showing up in many discussions without anyone deeply considering what it really means, and tends to be diversely defined and operationalized. There is a very real danger of the term becoming a meaningless cliché, unless a concerted effort is made to add precision and content to the discussion. In addition, even if culture is gaining some currency in the sustainable development debate, the role of cultural policy remains unclear. Much more research in considering and clarifying the role of cultural policy in this context needs to be conducted. It is this gap in the academic literature and cultural policy on which the issue focuses.

Prior to introducing the articles that comprise this special issue, there are two final remarks we want to make. First, our primary focus is on culture as creative or artistic expression, as is common in cultural policy, but we connect this to a more anthropological notion of culture as a way of life because the unresolved tension between these two notions impedes a systematic engagement with culture for sustainable development. Second, while we use different notions of culture, in terms of policy, we focus on cultural policy alone. We do not explore other policy domains in which culture may have a role to play. This too is a necessary exploration, but one that remains beyond the scope of this special issue.

With these contexts as a backdrop, this special issue brings together a series of critical examinations of culture and sustainable development in ways that articulate and contemplate different roles for cultural policy. The articles 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.

The first three articles by David Throsby, Y. Raj Isar, and Jordi Baltà Portolés and Milena Dragićević Šešić provide insightful critical analyses and aim for greater conceptual clarity in defining the concepts of ‘cultural sustainability’, ‘culture and sustainable development’, and ‘culturally sustainable development’. They also consider the conditions under which international organisations (such as UN and UNESCO) orchestrate intermediaries (such as UCLG, the United Cities and Local Governments, and other networks) to influence and monitor state behavior. The question is whether the concepts have become so-called floating signifiers. A growing number of issue-areas in globalized world concerning environmental, economic, social, and cultural changes have been a complicating factor in arts and cultural institutions. New arguments are needed for integrating culture into sustainable development processes. When the General Assembly of the UN approved seventeen Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, none of the goals referred to the cases for integrating culture into sustainable development planning and decision-making. One question is, how effective an instrument can UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) be in these issues?

The next three articles by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller; Kirsten Loach, Jennifer Rowley, and Jillian Griffiths; and M. Sharon Jeannotte challenge cultural institutions and local cultural administrations to operate as vital environmental participants with a stake in the future of the planet and all its inhabitants. One presumption is that the work of these institutions in sustaining culture should be valued according to its instrumental role in social, economic, and environmental sustainability, rather than according to its intrinsic cultural value. Emphasizing green cultural policy, one question comes up: Should, and how might, ecological criteria replace market criteria when determining the value of cultural production? Can environmentally truthful bookkeeping, for example, advanced through pressures from cultural funders, be widely implemented in the cultural sector by factoring in eco-system and atmospheric liabilities associated with all operations, from architecture to corporate sponsorship to digitization of cultural practices, performances, and exhibitions?

Another set of cultural policy issues also emerges. The integration of cultural rights in cultural policies and in sustainable development strategies has traditionally been hampered by a limited understanding of the concepts of cultural rights and the vagueness of their policy implications. In this regard, Jordi Baltà Portolés and Milena Dragićević Šešić argue that the goal divergence is relatively high in cultural rights and therefore states may be more reluctant to delegate resources and increase autonomy to develop those rights. Extending from this, M. Sharon Jeannotte discusses whether aboriginal perspectives on culture and nature can provide an alternative narrative that will advance our understanding of culture’s role in community sustainability and counteract the monocultural perspective that is the legacy of colonialism throughout the world.

In the closing article, Nancy Duxbury, Anita Kangas, and Christiaan De Beukelaer argue that culture’s absence from sustainable development debates is rooted in the longue durée of interplay among theoretical and policy debates on culture in sustainable development and on cultural policy since the mid-twentieth century. Based on their analysis and an assessment of the other articles in the special issue, they propose four roles cultural policy can play towards sustainable development: first, to safeguard and sustain cultural practices and rights; second, to ‘green’ the cultural sector’s operations and impacts; third, to raise awareness and catalyse actions about sustainability and climate change; and fourth, to foster ‘ecological citizenship’. In this regard, the challenge for cultural policy is to embody very different co-existing and overlapping roles in relation to sustainable development.

–