Abstract
The inclusion of Article 13 in UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (hereinafter CDCE) marked a breakthrough in long-standing campaigns to give greater recognition to culture in development policy. The CDCE sets out a number of important principles and provisions relating to culture and development and, for the first time, states that are Party to the CDCE are formally required to “to integrate culture into their development policies at all levels”. This commitment has since been reinforced through a series of UN resolutions on culture and development, most recently through the MONDIACULT 2022 Declaration and the UNESCO report on Culture and Sustainable Development that was submitted to the UN General Assembly in 2023. These developments attest to a growing formal recognition of cultural diversity as a transformative and positive force for sustainable development.
Much of this remains declaratory however, while the CDCE’s imprint on the sustainable development agenda in practice remains uneven at best. Pointedly, culture was not mentioned in the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that set the international development agenda between 2000-2015, and an international campaign to include a goal for culture within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ended in disappointment for supporters. This has limited the momentum that the CDCE can bring when formulating national sustainable development frameworks and international mechanisms of development cooperation, where culture generally remains underprioritised.
Taking stock of the evolution of Art.13 and its record of implementation so far presents a number of challenges, and it is important to consider these briefly from the outset. Some of these challenges are common to assessing the implementation of other articles of the CDCE: in particular, gaps in the information that is made available by Parties and a lack of reliable and comparable quantitative data. But Art.13 also presents something of an outlier in the CDCE by foregrounding the integration of “culture” into development policies, when most of the instrument’s other key provisions tend to be trained more precisely on questions of policy and legislation that relate directly to “cultural expressions” (framed by an understanding that this refers to the goods and services associated with the cultural and creative industries). Art.13 instead situates efforts to foster the diversity of cultural expressions in relation to a wider “framework” – culture and conditions conducive to sustainable development – that is open to a very wide range of possible interpretations and measures by Parties. Indeed, “culture” is largely left open in the instrument for Parties to define (Article 4 provides eight definitions around which the CDCE is built, but does not define culture).
It has been noted that Art.13 requires Parties to operate with a more all-encompassing or anthropological approach to culture understood in its broadest sense as a “way of life” (encompassing such things as traditions, values and identities), and following the normative innovations that can be found in landmarks at UNESCO such as the MONDIACULT 1982 Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies (40 years before the MONDIACULT 2022 Declaration) and the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Such an approach is often seen to be a progressive move, since much of what has traditionally happened under the banner of development has been under the banner of universalising a particular [Euro-American] experience of modernity, rationalising colonial and neocolonial relations in the process. By introducing rights and obligations around the integration of culture in sustainable development policies, in the context of an instrument that affirms the universal value of cultural diversity, the CDCE sets out a powerful case – as UNESCO puts it – to “foster a paradigm shift to renew policymaking towards an inclusive, people-centred and context-relevant approach.” This positions the CDCE as an important reference point in the wider “cultural turn” in development policy and practice that is observed to have been taking place in recent decades.
For its part, UNESCO has been a site for the articulation of a wide range of responses to the [notoriously complex] questions associated with how exactly to conceive and integrate culture in development, both in theory and in practice. It has been remarked that, at a strategic level, UNESCO has tended to remain ambivalent and nuanced on such questions, while on the ground and through its operational and promotional material it has tended to delimit the matter through the terminology of creative economy and entrepreneurship. This has been a pragmatic response, helping to clearly delineate the scope of implementation and to better capture the attention of policymakers. One of the arguments advanced in this chapter however is that this pragmatism, while it has been productive in many respects, has also been limited in what it set out to do: the evidence so far from Parties is that the message has not really got through. Given the scale of the development challenges that we now face, and the record of the creative economy in practice, it also appears less justified today than it was in the 2000s.
With the above points in mind, this chapter seeks to offer a critical and constructive analysis of Art.13 of the CDCE. Section 1 opens by reviewing some of the article’s intellectual and normative precedents. Section 2 builds on this by considering some of the processes that gave Art.13 its form in the final draft of the CDCE, as well as considering how Art.13 came to be situated in relation to other key provisions in the text. In doing this, the emphasis is on drawing out some of the implications for how Art.13 has been given form through its related operational and monitoring frameworks, which are then addressed in Section 3. Section 4 moves on to consider some of the evidence that has accumulated regarding the application and implementation of Art.13, seeking to identify some key trends and to draw out what are some of the key challenges for the implementation of a progressive agenda for culture and sustainable development in the coming years.
To do this, the chapter examines a range of material, in particular the Quadrennial Periodic Reports (QPRs) that Parties to the CDCE are required to submit to UNESCO every four years, as well as a number of national sustainable development frameworks and related policies (cultural and other). It also responds to some secondary analyses of the record of implementation so far, particularly in the form of UNESCO’s most recent (2022) flagship global monitoring report, ReShaping Policies for Creativity. To develop the account, a number of policy innovations and developments from around the world are considered - including in particular from Latin America, which has been the source of a number of important recent trends and experiments in forging the culture and sustainable development nexus.
Much of this remains declaratory however, while the CDCE’s imprint on the sustainable development agenda in practice remains uneven at best. Pointedly, culture was not mentioned in the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that set the international development agenda between 2000-2015, and an international campaign to include a goal for culture within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ended in disappointment for supporters. This has limited the momentum that the CDCE can bring when formulating national sustainable development frameworks and international mechanisms of development cooperation, where culture generally remains underprioritised.
Taking stock of the evolution of Art.13 and its record of implementation so far presents a number of challenges, and it is important to consider these briefly from the outset. Some of these challenges are common to assessing the implementation of other articles of the CDCE: in particular, gaps in the information that is made available by Parties and a lack of reliable and comparable quantitative data. But Art.13 also presents something of an outlier in the CDCE by foregrounding the integration of “culture” into development policies, when most of the instrument’s other key provisions tend to be trained more precisely on questions of policy and legislation that relate directly to “cultural expressions” (framed by an understanding that this refers to the goods and services associated with the cultural and creative industries). Art.13 instead situates efforts to foster the diversity of cultural expressions in relation to a wider “framework” – culture and conditions conducive to sustainable development – that is open to a very wide range of possible interpretations and measures by Parties. Indeed, “culture” is largely left open in the instrument for Parties to define (Article 4 provides eight definitions around which the CDCE is built, but does not define culture).
It has been noted that Art.13 requires Parties to operate with a more all-encompassing or anthropological approach to culture understood in its broadest sense as a “way of life” (encompassing such things as traditions, values and identities), and following the normative innovations that can be found in landmarks at UNESCO such as the MONDIACULT 1982 Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies (40 years before the MONDIACULT 2022 Declaration) and the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Such an approach is often seen to be a progressive move, since much of what has traditionally happened under the banner of development has been under the banner of universalising a particular [Euro-American] experience of modernity, rationalising colonial and neocolonial relations in the process. By introducing rights and obligations around the integration of culture in sustainable development policies, in the context of an instrument that affirms the universal value of cultural diversity, the CDCE sets out a powerful case – as UNESCO puts it – to “foster a paradigm shift to renew policymaking towards an inclusive, people-centred and context-relevant approach.” This positions the CDCE as an important reference point in the wider “cultural turn” in development policy and practice that is observed to have been taking place in recent decades.
For its part, UNESCO has been a site for the articulation of a wide range of responses to the [notoriously complex] questions associated with how exactly to conceive and integrate culture in development, both in theory and in practice. It has been remarked that, at a strategic level, UNESCO has tended to remain ambivalent and nuanced on such questions, while on the ground and through its operational and promotional material it has tended to delimit the matter through the terminology of creative economy and entrepreneurship. This has been a pragmatic response, helping to clearly delineate the scope of implementation and to better capture the attention of policymakers. One of the arguments advanced in this chapter however is that this pragmatism, while it has been productive in many respects, has also been limited in what it set out to do: the evidence so far from Parties is that the message has not really got through. Given the scale of the development challenges that we now face, and the record of the creative economy in practice, it also appears less justified today than it was in the 2000s.
With the above points in mind, this chapter seeks to offer a critical and constructive analysis of Art.13 of the CDCE. Section 1 opens by reviewing some of the article’s intellectual and normative precedents. Section 2 builds on this by considering some of the processes that gave Art.13 its form in the final draft of the CDCE, as well as considering how Art.13 came to be situated in relation to other key provisions in the text. In doing this, the emphasis is on drawing out some of the implications for how Art.13 has been given form through its related operational and monitoring frameworks, which are then addressed in Section 3. Section 4 moves on to consider some of the evidence that has accumulated regarding the application and implementation of Art.13, seeking to identify some key trends and to draw out what are some of the key challenges for the implementation of a progressive agenda for culture and sustainable development in the coming years.
To do this, the chapter examines a range of material, in particular the Quadrennial Periodic Reports (QPRs) that Parties to the CDCE are required to submit to UNESCO every four years, as well as a number of national sustainable development frameworks and related policies (cultural and other). It also responds to some secondary analyses of the record of implementation so far, particularly in the form of UNESCO’s most recent (2022) flagship global monitoring report, ReShaping Policies for Creativity. To develop the account, a number of policy innovations and developments from around the world are considered - including in particular from Latin America, which has been the source of a number of important recent trends and experiments in forging the culture and sustainable development nexus.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Oxford Commentary on the 2005 Convention on the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Publication status | Accepted for publication - 2024 |
Publication series
Name | Oxford Commentaries on International Cultural Heritage Law |
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Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Keywords
- UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions
- cultural and creative industries
- cultural diversity
- Sustainable Development
- Latin America and the Caribbean
- cultural rights