Cultural Sustainability

Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences

Torsten Meireis, Gabriele Rippl, Torsten Meireis, Gabriele Rippl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351124287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

If the political and social benchmarks of sustainability and sustainable development are to be met, ignoring the role of the humanities and social, cultural and ethical values is highly problematic. People's worldviews, beliefs and principles have an immediate impact on how they act and should be studied as cultural dimensions of sustainability.

Collating contributions from internationally renowned theoreticians of culture and leading researchers working in the humanities and social sciences, this volume presents an in-depth, interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of cultural sustainability and the public visibility of such research. Beginning with a discussion of the concept of cultural sustainability, it goes on to explore its interaction with philosophy, theology, sociology, economics, arts and literature. In doing so, the book develops a much needed concept of 'culture' that can be adapted to various disciplines and applied to research on sustainability.

Addressing an important gap in sustainability research, this book will be of great interest to academics and students of sustainability and sustainable development, as well as those studying sustainability within the humanities and social sciences, such as cultural studies, ethics, theology, sociology, literature and history.

Part I
Concepts of culture and cultural sustainability

1 Introduction

Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl

A long-neglected question: the cultural dimension of sustainable development

Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits – not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth.

(WCED 1987: 16)

This quote from the famous “Our Common Future” report from the World Commission on Environment and Development stresses the interdependence of the ecological, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development – or in short: sustainability. While the necessity of the relationship between the components of sustainability has been highlighted time and again, the quote also shows that one important aspect tends to be overlooked, to wit, the cultural. This cultural dimension is usually omitted in the so-called triangle of sustainability or the three-pillar model of ecological, social and economic capital propagated by the World Bank (1997).

International debates on the function of culture in sustainable development did, belatedly, gain ground. The UNESCO-organised Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development in Stockholm (UNESCO 1998a) as well as the UNESCO and UNEP 2002 Johannesburg Roundtable on Cultural Diversity and Biodiversity (UNEP 2003) and the Johannesburg Summit’s decision for a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO 2002) functioned as stepping stones, but they mostly concentrated on topics concerning respect for cultural diversity and creativity (UNESCO 1998a: 13–14, UNESCO 1998b: 93–104; UNEP 2003). The overall significance of the cultural dimension of sustainability has only recently been acknowledged by the UNESCO’s Hanghzou Declaration, which voices a commitment to “Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies” (UNESCO 2013). The road leading from the UN division specialising in cultural questions to the UN at large has been rockier still: as Michael Gerber in this volume convincingly demonstrates, corresponding UN-Resolutions confirming this stance have been rather vague and late in appearance (65/166, 2010; 66/208, 2011; 68/223, 2013; 69/230/2014; 70/214, 2015), although admittedly now the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals contain elements expressly pertaining to culture, such as ‘quality education’.

In academia, debates on the cultural dimensions of sustainability in the wake of the Brundtland report sprang up in the fields of educational sciences (Sandri 2013; Sorgo 2011; Stoltenberg et al. 1999; cf. also Conclusion). In cultural policy, culture was proclaimed as a “fourth pillar of sustainability” and calls for a concerted effort in public and urban cultural development were made (Davies 2015; Böhm et al. 2014; DifU 2011; Banse et al. 2011; Duxbury and Jeannotte 2010; Nadarajah 2007; Krainer and Trattnigg 2007), because the “engines of cultural production require a singular and co-ordinated setting within government management structures” (Hawkes 2001: 38). However, it also became evident that culture may act as a factor severely impeding sustainability awareness (Hoffman 2015). A recently completed European research network explored different understandings of cultural sustainability (Dessein and Soini 2016). It analysed scientific discourses on policy development (Soini and Birkeland 2014), and showed that culture needs to be understood as an instrumental factor in sustainable development for the very reason that it may act as an additional, separate pillar in fostering sustainability, as a mediating agency between ecological, social and economic aspects of sustainability and as a basic pattern establishing a sustainability-friendly orientation (Dessein et al. 2015: 20–37). Even though cultural sustainability has received growing attention, the ways in which culture works in contexts of sustainability and how it is related to a system of values which, in turn, influences understandings of sustainability, are yet to be scrutinised. It is worthwhile to highlight one important aspect: the sustainability discourse has had a history that started long before the 1987 report from the World Commission on Environment and Development was published. It goes back as far as the eighteenth century: the concept is usually attributed to Saxonian official Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who proposed sustainable forestry within a deeply religious framework (Carlowitz 1713). The concept has since undergone several changes of meaning (Grober 2010). For that reason, a cultural understanding of sustainability has to take this wide range of different conceptualisations into account (Weigel 2010).

The significance of culture for sustainability issues: key concepts and central questions

As a normative idea, the concept of ‘sustainability’ has profound implications for the day-to-day cultural routines of societies. The way we consume and the way we understand prosperity or ‘well-being’, what we see as ‘the good life’ and which values we hold are closely related to our notion of sustainability. If, for instance, the general idea of ‘well-being’ in a given society is connected to a lifestyle of intensive resource consumption, then the idea of sufficiency, closely related to a global sustainability strategy accepting planetary boundaries (Rockstrøm et al. 2009) will be hard to implement politically in those regions already leaving the largest ecological footprint (Schneidewind and Zahrnt 2014). For that reason, it may be necessary to change those cultural concepts. On the other hand, evolving cultural ideas – like conservation (Engels 2006; Grober 2010) or new concepts of urbanisation (MoMa 2014) – may further global sustainable development. Moreover, the principle of sustainability may affect the cultural organisation of scientific research and the conceptualisation of scientific knowledge (Schneidewind 2014). Cultural studies and the humanities in general not only tackle normative questions but also reflect on visions of (non)sustainable action, which have the potential to influence the public perception of environmental issues that are linked to moral questions, as negotiated in works of fiction (literature, films, graphic narratives, computer games, etc.), religious or other cultural narratives. Thus, cultural sustainability has a double impact. Firstly, ecological, economic and social questions of sustainability can only be understood within the horizon of culture, rooted as they are in the ideas, imagery and concepts employed to describe sustainability. Secondly, and following from this observation, cultural sustainability is a topic in itself, as it necessitates research into traditions, modes of perception, methods of cognition, the conceptualisation of knowledge and the concept of sustainability itself, for instance, when its close connection to the idea of development is challenged as a colonial way of thinking (Mignolo 2011).

To look into the ways culture ‘works’ with regards to sustainability questions, we heuristically distinguish a wider and a narrower concept of culture. In a wider sense, ‘culture’ signifies the human activity of symbolising (Cassirer 1953–1957), thus denoting any way of communicating and coming to terms with the world by means of language, images, concepts and so forth, spanning a range from the most elaborate composition to the ordinary interactions of everyday life. In a narrower sense, ‘culture’ means the act of expressly producing, reproducing or modifying cultural symbols in performance, artistic, scientific or scholarly production (Williams 1989).

While the focus has been on the economic, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability, research on cultural aspects has mostly been limited to praising and protecting diversity and to describing cultural policy. In current political and academic debates, the important contribution of the humanities – theology, literary, media and cultural studies, social sciences as well as philosophy – to a sustainable world has not been adequately acknowledged. The contributions made by the arts and the humanities along with religious and philosophical discourses have received insufficient attention by politicians and social agents. While the externally visible signs of sustainability – scientific evidence – are necessary for long-term solutions to environmental crisis, equally relevant are those interior dimensions (Horlings 2015), i.e. the internal narratives and images that we use to make sense of the world and explore moral space (Nussbaum 1995). Deploying the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ (Taylor 2004), it is our claim that cultural products such as literary and religious narratives, visual works of art and films have an enormous impact on people’s world views, beliefs and values. They function as important means for the representation and mediation of societal problems and cultural anxieties.

The book and its structure

It has become clear that in existing discourses, culture – and with it cultural sustainability – has been conceptualised within narrow frameworks focusing solely on questions concerning cultural diversity, indigenous cultures, the significance of local identity and the role of creativity for community development. In many academic disciplines, however, much wider and more comprehensive definitions of culture are available which include complex concepts of human symbolic systems (see Meireis’ Chapter 5 in this volume). Yet to date, these extensive definitions of culture have had almost no impact on discussions of cultural sustainability. This is also true of scientific approaches to values and conceptualisations of sustainability not focused solely on the Brundtland report. Indeed, one upshot of our own research into the term ‘cultural sustainability’ is the realisation that values are central to the term and should figure prominently in future discussions of it. Actually, it is precisely these values that determine what we may understand as ‘sustainable’. Last but not least, historical, diachronic analyses (cf. Assmann’s Chapter 3 in this volume; Schliephake 2017) are indispensable when discussing cultural sustainability. While the general understanding of sustainability is oriented towards the future, cultural sustainability needs to take the past into account and thus deal with questions regarding cultural memory, cultural heritage and institutions such as archives, libraries and museums as vessels of conservation which help to hand down knowledge and cultural information to future generations.

All contributions to this book investigate the potential of cultural products to sharpen people’s awareness of their own actions and feelings of responsibility for their environment. Literature, visual works of art, film, graphic narratives, philosophical or religious narratives and images, all enable us to try out ideas in our imagination; they stimulate us to imagine possible alternative worlds and to identify with others (Ricoeur 2005). If the political and social benchmarks of sustainability and sustainable development are to be met, ignoring the role of the humanities on the one hand and that of social, cultural and ethical values on the other is highly problematic. After all, societal change toward more sustainable lifestyles is by no means solely caused and implemented by political decisions. Rather, such change is linked directly to people’s world views, beliefs and cultural values, which have an immediate impact on how we act – hence the need to study them as cultural dimensions of sustainability. Culture, however, is not a one-dimensional phenomenon easily harnessed towards a certain normative goal, but a multi-dimensional entity in itself. The complexity of the concept demands careful study, if its significance for sustainability discourse is to be explored. Possibly, the benchmarks mentioned above also need changing. For that reason, this collection of essays maps the field of cultural sustainability, by discussing and bringing together a range of fundamental concepts of culture, and by taking stock of the contributions from across the humanities and social sciences. Of course, the broadening of the discourse on cultural sustainability engenders a wide variety of scholarly and practical approaches, styles and methods.

The book comprises three main parts, the first of which introduces different concepts of cultural sustainability, thus combining different perspectives. Michael Gerber, who acts as Switzerland’s Special Envoy for Global Sustainable Development, sketches the role of cultural sustainability as a political term in debates at the United Nations, this, from the view of a participant in political processes. Spanning a period from the 1960s up to the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, Gerber describes the political and conceptual challenges that sustainability has endured. In her seminal contribution, literary scholar and cultural theoretician Aleida Assmann argues that the concept of ‘sustainability’ adds a new important meaning to our understanding of the future in terms of limited resources and a new understanding of human stewardship towards our planet. Other meanings of ‘future’, however, continue to be applied to political and economic contexts. She draws attention to the pluralisation of our time’s regimes and links the term ‘cultural sustainability’ to the theory of ‘cultural memory’ which she has developed. Theologian Wolfgang Huber then illuminates the ethical background of the debates on cultural sustainability by pointing to the importance of human rights in this context. In fleshing out the concept of ‘cultural genocide’ and by exploring the cultural dynamics of international law development, he presents an idea of cultural sustainability rooted with respect to diversity. Concentrating on the meaning of ‘culture’ in the concept of cultural sustainability, ethicist and theologian Torsten Meireis claims that an instrumental understanding of culture – common in sustainability debates – is dysfunctional as it treats normative assumptions as self-evident and does not take the agonal and productive aspects of culture into account. Meireis pleads instead for an explicit debate on normative questions and a stronger regard for the production of cultural assets and the traditions maintaining them.

The second part of the book brings together contributions from philosophy and the social sciences that explore the conditions and challenges of cultural sustainability. Philosopher Anton Leist questions the popular notion that sustainability issues are firmly rooted in cultural narratives and images pertaining to a politically liberal, progressive or social democratic and green agenda. By sketching the position of the philosopher Roger Scruton, Leist discusses the merits of a distinctly conservative concept of cultural sustainability. Examining consumption behaviour, sociologist Ulf Liebe looks at the behavioural mechanisms furthering or hindering sustainability and distinguishes between a culture as a constraint, which works through social norms, from culture as an enabling force which is embodied in rituals and practices. While social norms have only a short-term effect, the operation of rituals and cultural practices tends to be long-term. Philosopher Galit P. Wellner explores the intersection of the social and the cultural dimension of sustainability by presenting social happiness as a cultural value, which implies good social relations, a rich cultural environment and fair institutions, thus favouring a long-term eudaimonic rather than a short-term hedonistic perspective. Starting from the NASA’s definition of ‘planetary sustainability’ and the existing practices of space travel to the Moon or Mars, theologian and ethicist Andreas Losch argues that cultural sustainability is at the core of any understanding of interplanetary sustainability, dealing for instance with the dangers of forward or backward contamination of microbial life forms. Economists and scholars of cultural studies Marius Christen, Peter Seele and Lucas Zapf investigate cultural sustainability by applying Thomas S. Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift. They identify three paradigms of sustainability that offer solutions to different problems: resource crisis, environmental crisis and system crisis. As a fourth paradigm, they suggest contingency management, which responds to the more recent multi-crisis and which carries religious overtones of salvation.

The third part of this essay collection comprises contributions that investigate how the visual arts, literary texts and computer games scrutinise the relationship between social imaginaries and sustainable development. Cultural studies researcher Sacha Kagan sketches the development of the sustainability discourse in the performing and visual arts as well as in cultural studies. He argues that aesthetic and art-based pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Concepts of culture and cultural sustainability
• Part II Philosophy, sociology, economics and cultural sustainability
• Part III The arts, literature and cultural sustainability: theoretical, historical and contemporary perspectives
• Part IV Where do we go from here?