Content area
Full Text
Introduction
"Keeping the promise: united to achieve the Millennium Development Goals" is the heading of the 2010 [16] United Nations Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Outcome Document A/RES/65/1 (www.un.org/en/mdg/summit2010/pdf/mdg%20outcome%20document.pdf) which finally credits the MDG's most active "silent partner" with clear-cut implications for the success of development initiatives. Adopted in December 2010, its corresponding UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/65/166 (www.unesco.org/culture/pdf/text_unga_resolution__culture_%20and_development_en.pdf) "[e]mphasizes the important contribution of culture for sustainable development and the achievement of national development objectives and internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals" and "[i]nvites all Member States, intergovernmental bodies, organizations of the United Nations system and relevant non-governmental organizations [...] to ensure a more visible and effective integration and mainstreaming of culture in development policies and strategies at all levels".
To some, this signals the demise of an old tendency to regard the pervasive influence of culture as somewhat anodyne, cosmetic, incompatible or worse antonymic to economic growth. To others, it is a lesson learned from the vitality of emerging economies, that there is no single road to development. For UNESCO, however, it comes as a reward after decades of efforts - gathering international evidence, setting standards and building local capacities - based on an unwavering conviction that culture is essential to development in every way.
The recent financial crisis may have allayed an enduring faith in the miraculous powers of economics alone. But the founders of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, when faced with the need to advance "the objectives of international peace and of the common welfare of mankind" in the wake of the Second World War, intuited that a peace "based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not [...] secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world" (p. 3). UNESCO was born of a premonition that the world's diversity of knowledge and cultures would increasingly be called upon to play a special role as nations drew closer together in the latter half of the 20th century. The respect of diversity has always been paramount to the Organization. Already in 1946, it fell to UNESCO to conduct a survey to ascertain, in light of different doctrinal and cultural conceptions, the universal validity of the up-and-coming cornerstone...