Uittreksel
The COST Action IS1007 ‘Investigating Cultural Sustainability’ built a comprehensive analytical framework that recognises three ‘roles’ of culture in sustainable development.
First, culture can have a supportive and self-promoting role (characterised as ‘culture in sustainable development’). This expands conventional sustainable development discourse by adding culture as a self-standing 4th pillar alongside separate ecological, social, and economic considerations and imperatives. Second, a role (‘culture for sustainable development’) which offers culture as a more influential force that can operate beyond itself. This role moves culture into a framing, contextualising and mediating mode that can balance all three of the existing pillars and guide sustainable development between economic, social, and ecological pressures and needs. Third, a more fundamental role (‘culture as sustainable development’) which sees culture as the necessary overall foundation and structure for achieving the aims of sustainable development.
In all three roles, the recognition that culture is at the root of all human decisions and actions and an overarching concern (even a new paradigm) in sustainable development thinking, causes culture and sustainability to become mutually intertwined; the distinctions between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability thus begin to fade.
| Taal | Engels |
|---|
| Plaats productie | Jyväskylä, Finland |
|---|---|
| Uitgeverij | University of Jyväskylä |
| Aantal pagina's | 72 |
| ISBN van geprinte versie | 978-951-39-6176-3 |
| Status | Gepubliceerd - 6-mei-2015 |
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Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development : Conclusions of COST Action IS 1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability. / Dessein, Joost; Soini, Katriina (Editor); Fairclough, Graham (Editor); Horlings, Lummina (Editor).
Jyväskylä, Finland : University of Jyväskylä, 2015. 72 blz.Onderzoeksoutput: Boek/rapport › Boek
TY - BOOK
T1 - Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development
T2 - Conclusions of COST Action IS 1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability
AU - Dessein, Joost
A2 - Soini, Katriina
A2 - Fairclough, Graham
A2 - Horlings, Lummina
PY - 2015/5/6
Y1 - 2015/5/6
N2 - It should be obvious that culture matters to sustainable development. Yet almost 30 years after the Brundtland report ‘Our Common Future’ the incorporation of culture into sustainabilitydebates seems to remain a great challenge, both scientifically and politically. There have been some recent attempts to bring culture into sustainability, by trans- and inter-national organisationsand by cross/trans-disciplinary scientific endeavours, but they continue to swim against the prevailing current of conventional sustainability discourses rooted in environmental and economic perspectives.Culture, sustainability and sustainable development are complicated concepts that are not always easy for scientists, policy makers or practitioners to grasp or apply. In the course of our four-year (2011-15) COST Action, IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability, we explored all three concepts and learnt to embrace their multiple meanings and connotations. In this final report from the Action we present their diversity and plurality as a meaningful resource for building a comprehensive analytical framework for the structured study and application of ‘culture and sustainable development’. Our conclusions are presented in three chapters, after a Prologue to set the scene and followed by a reflective and forward looking Epilogue. Our first chapter offers our view of key concepts, and presents the three important ways we identify for culture to play important roles in sustainable development. First, culture can have a supportive and self-promoting role (which we characterise as ‘culture in sustainable development’). This already-established approach expands conventional sustainable development discourse by adding culture as a self-standing 4th pillar alongside separate ecological, social, and economic considerations and imperatives. We see a second role (‘culture for sustainable development’), however, which offers culture as a more influential force that can operate beyond itself. This moves culture into a framing, contextualising and mediating mode, one that can balance all three of the existing pillars and guide sustainable development between economic, social, and ecological pressures and needs. Third, we argue that there can be an even a more fundamental role for culture (‘culture as sustainable development’) which sees it as the essential foundation and structure for achieving the aims of sustainable development. In this role it integrates, coordinates and guides all aspects of sustainable action. In all three roles, recognising culture as at the root of all human decisions and actions, and as an overarching concern (even a new paradigm) in sustainable development thinking, enables culture and sustainability to become mutually intertwined so that the distinctions between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability begin to fade.Our second chapter, ‘Culture at the crossroads of policy’, identifies a number of different topics, fields or themes that are commonly – or should be – addressed by policies, and the streams or flows of thought and action that they follow; we liken them to ‘scripts’ that guide the performance of sustainability. These scripts reveal the broad contours of a new type of policy landscape. We explore eight overlapping themes: the negotiation of memories, identities and heritage; the relevance of place, landscape and territory; the complexities of social life, commons and participation; the centrality of creative practices and activities; culturally sensitive policies for economic development; nature conservation; the importance of increasing awareness and knowledge of sustainability; and finally, policies aiming at transformations. Our analysis reveals that culture is not just the subject or object of cultural policy; it should also inform and be integrated with all other policies, for the economic, the social and the environmental, and for the global and the local. All the best and most successful policies are (although not necessarily consciously) culturally informed. Policies dealing with education, tourism, research, cultural diplomacy, social policies, and city and regional planning, as well as other areas, can integrate culture in the core of their policy-making to various degrees.All these ‘scripts’ are interlinked and overlap, of course, but they can be viewed in the framework of the three roles that we have just summarised. In the first role, policy strengthens the key intrinsic values of culture, and tends to focus on creativity and diversity of cultural expressions and the contributions of artistic/ cultural activity and expressions to human-centred sustainable development trajectories. In the second case, when culture is understood as having a mediating role, the policy extends to influence, share and shape the aims of other public policies, like livelihood, industries, social and environmental well-being. In the third case, policy will promote broader transformations towards more holistically sustainable societies, for example through increased awareness and behaviour changes that can provide catalysts and enablers for grassroots collective actions, and through the development of the capacity and capability of individuals and communities to adapt and carry on more sustainable ways of life.Assessing the impact and effects of both policies and politics is a crucial aspect of sustainability. There are several methodologies for carrying out assessments and communicating their results, but indicators are perhaps the most commonly used, and we turn to these in our third chapter. From the complexity of everyday life, indicators select a few representative threads, headlines or leverage points that can be distilled into more easily comprehensible evidence for the impacts of events and trajectories, the effects of different courses of action, and the quality and direction of change. Existing culturally-sensitive indicator sets are limited, and in this publication we therefore focus on specific challenges. These include the availability, standardisation, aggregation and ranking of data, all of which are required to allow allow cultural statistics to be consistently constructed and made useful, although we also recognise the historical and local specificity of indicators – they must be fit-for-context. We offer suggestions for the way forward, including the importance of joint learning processes and participatory development of indicators, the need for the collection of good examples and practices (notably of qualitative indicators, with illustrations of how they can be used and combined with quantitative indicators) and above all the acknowledgment in indicator construction of the three different roles of culture in, for and as sustainable development. In our Epilogue, we reflect on the intellectual and cultural journey and exchanges that the Action has afforded its many participants. We have explored new territory between disciplines, between cultures and between the conventional three pillars of sustainable development. A major lesson is how little is actually known about the current and the potential inter-operability of culture and the sustainability ‘tripod’, and we therefore conclude by looking forward. We suggest lines for future research in four categories - concepts, methodologies and practices, evidence bases, and selected topics that seem us to be currently key. With new European and global funding streams becoming available to address sustainability issues (for example within the ERA and through Horizon 2020), and supported by our extensive webs of cross- and inter-disciplinary collaborations, we can see the necessity and the advantages for everyone of culture gaining a more central and transformative role in sustainable development discourse, and in action. We envisage that the insights of this COST Action will help to ensure a strong ‘cultural stream’ in future research and policy.
AB - It should be obvious that culture matters to sustainable development. Yet almost 30 years after the Brundtland report ‘Our Common Future’ the incorporation of culture into sustainabilitydebates seems to remain a great challenge, both scientifically and politically. There have been some recent attempts to bring culture into sustainability, by trans- and inter-national organisationsand by cross/trans-disciplinary scientific endeavours, but they continue to swim against the prevailing current of conventional sustainability discourses rooted in environmental and economic perspectives.Culture, sustainability and sustainable development are complicated concepts that are not always easy for scientists, policy makers or practitioners to grasp or apply. In the course of our four-year (2011-15) COST Action, IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability, we explored all three concepts and learnt to embrace their multiple meanings and connotations. In this final report from the Action we present their diversity and plurality as a meaningful resource for building a comprehensive analytical framework for the structured study and application of ‘culture and sustainable development’. Our conclusions are presented in three chapters, after a Prologue to set the scene and followed by a reflective and forward looking Epilogue. Our first chapter offers our view of key concepts, and presents the three important ways we identify for culture to play important roles in sustainable development. First, culture can have a supportive and self-promoting role (which we characterise as ‘culture in sustainable development’). This already-established approach expands conventional sustainable development discourse by adding culture as a self-standing 4th pillar alongside separate ecological, social, and economic considerations and imperatives. We see a second role (‘culture for sustainable development’), however, which offers culture as a more influential force that can operate beyond itself. This moves culture into a framing, contextualising and mediating mode, one that can balance all three of the existing pillars and guide sustainable development between economic, social, and ecological pressures and needs. Third, we argue that there can be an even a more fundamental role for culture (‘culture as sustainable development’) which sees it as the essential foundation and structure for achieving the aims of sustainable development. In this role it integrates, coordinates and guides all aspects of sustainable action. In all three roles, recognising culture as at the root of all human decisions and actions, and as an overarching concern (even a new paradigm) in sustainable development thinking, enables culture and sustainability to become mutually intertwined so that the distinctions between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability begin to fade.Our second chapter, ‘Culture at the crossroads of policy’, identifies a number of different topics, fields or themes that are commonly – or should be – addressed by policies, and the streams or flows of thought and action that they follow; we liken them to ‘scripts’ that guide the performance of sustainability. These scripts reveal the broad contours of a new type of policy landscape. We explore eight overlapping themes: the negotiation of memories, identities and heritage; the relevance of place, landscape and territory; the complexities of social life, commons and participation; the centrality of creative practices and activities; culturally sensitive policies for economic development; nature conservation; the importance of increasing awareness and knowledge of sustainability; and finally, policies aiming at transformations. Our analysis reveals that culture is not just the subject or object of cultural policy; it should also inform and be integrated with all other policies, for the economic, the social and the environmental, and for the global and the local. All the best and most successful policies are (although not necessarily consciously) culturally informed. Policies dealing with education, tourism, research, cultural diplomacy, social policies, and city and regional planning, as well as other areas, can integrate culture in the core of their policy-making to various degrees.All these ‘scripts’ are interlinked and overlap, of course, but they can be viewed in the framework of the three roles that we have just summarised. In the first role, policy strengthens the key intrinsic values of culture, and tends to focus on creativity and diversity of cultural expressions and the contributions of artistic/ cultural activity and expressions to human-centred sustainable development trajectories. In the second case, when culture is understood as having a mediating role, the policy extends to influence, share and shape the aims of other public policies, like livelihood, industries, social and environmental well-being. In the third case, policy will promote broader transformations towards more holistically sustainable societies, for example through increased awareness and behaviour changes that can provide catalysts and enablers for grassroots collective actions, and through the development of the capacity and capability of individuals and communities to adapt and carry on more sustainable ways of life.Assessing the impact and effects of both policies and politics is a crucial aspect of sustainability. There are several methodologies for carrying out assessments and communicating their results, but indicators are perhaps the most commonly used, and we turn to these in our third chapter. From the complexity of everyday life, indicators select a few representative threads, headlines or leverage points that can be distilled into more easily comprehensible evidence for the impacts of events and trajectories, the effects of different courses of action, and the quality and direction of change. Existing culturally-sensitive indicator sets are limited, and in this publication we therefore focus on specific challenges. These include the availability, standardisation, aggregation and ranking of data, all of which are required to allow allow cultural statistics to be consistently constructed and made useful, although we also recognise the historical and local specificity of indicators – they must be fit-for-context. We offer suggestions for the way forward, including the importance of joint learning processes and participatory development of indicators, the need for the collection of good examples and practices (notably of qualitative indicators, with illustrations of how they can be used and combined with quantitative indicators) and above all the acknowledgment in indicator construction of the three different roles of culture in, for and as sustainable development. In our Epilogue, we reflect on the intellectual and cultural journey and exchanges that the Action has afforded its many participants. We have explored new territory between disciplines, between cultures and between the conventional three pillars of sustainable development. A major lesson is how little is actually known about the current and the potential inter-operability of culture and the sustainability ‘tripod’, and we therefore conclude by looking forward. We suggest lines for future research in four categories - concepts, methodologies and practices, evidence bases, and selected topics that seem us to be currently key. With new European and global funding streams becoming available to address sustainability issues (for example within the ERA and through Horizon 2020), and supported by our extensive webs of cross- and inter-disciplinary collaborations, we can see the necessity and the advantages for everyone of culture gaining a more central and transformative role in sustainable development discourse, and in action. We envisage that the insights of this COST Action will help to ensure a strong ‘cultural stream’ in future research and policy.
M3 - Book
SN - 978-951-39-6176-3
BT - Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development
PB - University of Jyväskylä
CY - Jyväskylä, Finland
ER -