The Nexus between Cultural Heritage and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Network Perspective

Abstract

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted by UN in 2015 as a framework to guide collective efforts towards sustainability globally. More recently, it has been argued that we also need to explore sustainable development from a more localized lens since regions and cities face their own specific challenges. It is also necessary to obtain comprehensive empirical evidence of local business networks collectively contribute to the SDGs since the very last goal of the SDGs is about partnership. We engage these topics by analyzing the nexus between cultural heritage and sustainability through local cultural and creative industries. By analyzing business investment networks around 1355 cultural heritage sites composed of 66473 organizations in 293 cities in China, we found evidence that a city’s investment network structure and composition matter for a city’s progress in SDGs. Specifically, the network structure of many cohesive communities contributes to progress in local SDGs, and more frequent local knowledge sharing (compared to trans-city knowledge sharing) strengthens this relationship. As one of the first studies exploring the nexus between cultural heritages and the SDGs of cities through network analysis, it provides new insights on importance of integration of local actors in achieving the SDGs.