UNESCO and the Nordic Culture Fund: Study of culture as a public good
A collaborative initiative between UNESCO and the Nordic Culture Fund focuses on the concept of ‘Culture as a Public Good’, with the aim of achieving a more widespread understanding of the role and importance of culture for the sustainable development of societies.
About UNESCO
UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Through concrete tools and recommendations, it guides states in promoting conditions that ensure that fundamental rights and freedoms also apply to artists, journalists, researchers and educators.
The concept of culture as a public good has gained momentum since the declaration of the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development – MONDIACULT in Mexico in September 2022.
The concept was profiled as a forward-looking term, ensuring that culture is further being put on the international policy agenda and demonstrating its transformative impact on sustainable development.
Global Public Goods
Global public goods are those resources belonging to humanity that cannot be adequately provided by individual states or non-state actors, and must therefore be managed, provided and protected by all countries working together. Global public goods include health, shared digital resources, biodiversity and the global financial system.
As part of the follow-up to the MONDICULT conference, UNESCO is conducting study ‘Culture as a Public Good’ with support from the Nordic Culture Fund.
The study will be structured around two main phases. The first phase aims to examine the role of culture as a public good and explore all the ways and areas in which culture can actively contribute to both social and green sustainable development. The second phase focuses on identifying best practices. Where can culture be seen to have played an essential role as a global public good in relation to sustainable development and what can the future development agenda learn from these examples?
UN Summit of the Future 21-23 September 2024
The position of culture in the United Nation’s sustainable development agenda will be discussed in September 2024 at the UN Summit of the Future.
At the Summit of the Future, three documents are up for negotiation: The Pact for the Future, The Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. In particular, the spirit of the Pact for the Future is to create a more inclusive direction for global governance. The goal is therefore to move us forward with the post-2030 sustainable development agenda, which also provides an opportunity to clarify the role of culture as part of the agenda.
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