Sustainability Requires Cultural Learning

Abstract

I have been asked to reflect on the work of the World Commission on Culture and Development, for which I served as Executive Secretary. The decadeold deliberations of this body have become canon; they provided a benchmark for new ways of thinking about culture and cultural policy. They also launched the contemporary destinies of the notion of “cultural diversity” deliberately foregrounded in the very title of its report, Our Creative Diversity—as a key trope of international cultural politics and now enshrined in UNESCO’s recently adopted Convention on the Promotion and Protection of Cultural Expressions. Today ‘sustainability’ has become a buzzword, used in ways that diverge considerably from the concept formulated in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future, that Commission’s report, defined sustainable development as a process “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (my emphasis). In the welter of current usages that now surround us, the powerful idea of intergenerational responsibility has been lost. As an almost ritual qualifier, the word “sustainable” is added to an array of processes and, having become commonplace as well as a floating signifier, connotes much simpler and far less ambitious ideas. Thus it can refer, inter alia, to the durability or maintainability of a process, e.g., “development,” to the medium or long-term viability of a project or institution, and to how certain practices may be conducive to a better quality of life. The World Commission on Culture and Development carefully