UNESCO and cultural diversity: democratisation, commodification or governmentalisation of culture?

Abstract

The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) was first adopted by its member states in October 2005. The document defines UNESCO's general principles and conceptualisations regarding culture, cultural diversity and expressions. In order to better manage culture, cultural expressions refer above all to goods and services of the markets, but another, more universally humanitarian and participatory aspect is also present. For the United Nations member states and especially countries that ratified it, the Convention offers policy and legal guidelines to support all forms of cultural diversity and expressions and the actors working with them. By using Foucauldian discourse analysis and Foucauldian, Marxist/Frankfurtian, and Habermasian theoretical frameworks, this article considers the Convention's way of defining rationalities for culture and cultural diversity, and practices through which the goals embedded in rationalities are achieved. As a result, three different but intertwined discourses take shape: governmentalisation, commodification and democratisation.

Globalization, Culture, and Development

“…The 2005 Convention brought the economic dimension of culture and the arts centre stage in UNESCO's work (Pyykkönen, 2012). It might be argued that the Convention has reinforced the "economization" of the concept of culture.…”

“…Yet, unsurprisingly, the Convention also links culture to international and national development policies and cooperation, poverty reduction, economic growth, social cohesion, traditional expressions of minorities and indigenous peoples, interaction, and creativity. It also sees culture as an instrumentality in achieving certain political, social, and economic goals, while cultural expressions are important both for their market value and as adjuncts to better governance systems (Pyykkönen, 2012;Singh, 2011b, pp. 100-107).…”

Den utmanande diskussionen - Debattskrift om kulturpolitik och identiteter i Norden

“…Även om partiideologiskt baserade nyanser finns gällande vilka betydelser som begreppet resurs tilldelas, finns överlag en tydlig betoning av resurs i ekonomisk bemärkelse. Inte minst i Unesco:s konvention om kulturell mångfald, som antogs 2005 och som utgör ett explicit ramverk för den svenska regeringens politik på området, kombineras ett demokratiperspektiv med ett ekonomiskt perspektiv (Pyykkönen 2012;Singh 2011). Denna kombination ligger väl i linje med en övergripande tendens i västerländsk och i viss mån global politik att vilja kombinera olika aspekter av samhällsutveckling snarare än att skilja dem åt.…”

Diversity and cultural policy: cultural citizenship as a tool for inclusion

“…This emerging literature discusses the basic ways to develop the function of culture within diversity contexts, in order to enhance citizenship. We may say that the democratization and national identity building roles of culture both trace their genesis to cultural studies, and they have been related as the latest period of the incorporation of diversity within cultural studies (Pyykkönen 2012). The first debate tries to discuss culture as a distributive good that has to meet the equality principle as a public good, while the second debate makes visible the tension between national identity maintenance and building with complex identities in contexts of diversity.…”