CULTURE AND SUSTAINABILITY

As Raymond Williams now-famously said, ‘culture’ is one of the two or three most complicated words in English usage

Embedding sustainability into the higher education curriculum has been far from straightforward. Consequently, implementation has been patchy – both in terms of disciplinary spread and in terms of the understandings of sustainability  A culture for sustainability can be thought of as one in which organizational members hold shared assumptions and beliefs about the importance of balancing economic efficiency, social equity and environmental accountability, and the failure to embed sustainability in HEIs suggests it has failed to become part of the culture.

This observation is supported by UNESCO’s call to integrate the values inherent in sustainable development into all aspects of learning and that most barriers to university implementation of  sustainability are human rather than technical.

Culture matters in sustainable development.  All the planet’s environmental problems and certainly all its social and economic problems have cultural activity and decisions – people and human actions – at their roots. Solutions are therefore likely to be also culturally based, and the existing models of sustainable development forged from economic or environmental concern are unlikely to be successful without cultural considerations. If culture is not made explicit, discussed, and argued over explicitly within the sustainability debates, it does not have power in the decision making. Yet incorporating culture in the sustainability debates seems to be a major challenge. The scientific challenge is that both culture and sustainability are complex, contested, multidisciplinary and normative concepts. The policy challenge is that a broad understanding of culture requires cross-sectoral or even transdisciplinary policies, and innovative, at times even radical modes of implementation that involve re-examination of broad-spectrum issues such as governance, democratic participation, and social equity.

I for one did not fully foresee the success of the idea of ‘Sustainable Development’ when it was introduced in 1987 by the Brundtland publication ‘Our Common Future’. Over 30 years later, the idea is still increasingly being presented as a pathway to all that is good and desirable in society and is widely adopted and frequently advocated. This was clearly illustrated at Rio+20 in June 2012 culminating in the agreement by member states to set up the sustainable development goals. Several subsequent policy commitments have cemented the idea of culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development and even placing culture at the “heart of sustainability”. For some time, the mainstream prioritised the implement of sustainable development in terms of ecological, social, and economic ‘pillars’ as confirmed at the Johannesburg Summit of 2002, which I attended, but often labelled in symbolic ways, such as people-profit-planet. However, attempts to keep these three dimensions in balance and to make sustainability a ‘win-win-win’ solution for all three remain unsatisfactory or in many people’s eyes an outcome to be sought but never found.

During a four-year investigation from 2011-15 an international team explored all three concepts to understand and to embrace their multiple meanings and connotations. The final report can be read here:  “Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development” , which summarizes the main conclusions of the network 

 Its first chapter offers an interesting view of key concepts and presents three important roles they identify for culture to play in sustainable development. First, culture can have a supportive and self-promoting role (which they characterise as ‘culture in sustainable development’). This approach expands conventional sustainable development discourse by adding culture as a self-standing 4th pillar alongside separate ecological, social, and economic considerations and imperatives. A second role (‘culture for sustainable development’), however, advocates culture as a more influential force; it 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, they argue that there can be an even 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.