What Does Culture Mean for the UNDP?

Abstract

‘Culture’ is one of those concepts so widely used that it tends to fall into ambiguity and vagueness. Institutions dealing with power use them quite often in order to produce profuse, but somehow vacuous, discourses. That would be the case of the influential Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). After evidencing there is not a clear, plain, unitary idea of what ‘culture’ means in these yearly published reports, this research makes explicit – through a hermeneutical approach – the cultural logic underlying the ‘human development’ framework. UNDP turns qualitative culture into a quantitative matter. Thus development discourse becomes one of identity. While explicitly speaking about cultural diversity, implicitly it splits the world in a binary, dichotomic way: the West and the Rest, Developed and Developing and us and them. Hence, instead of a supposedly universal discourse promoting change, we find a culturally and historically defined one that reinforces – in a subtle way – the hegemonic epistemological and political patterns that sustain the present status quo.