The Stories Museums Tell

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 sustainability debates 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 organisations and 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.