Mondiacult, SDGs, and the Culture Goal

2 October

By Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy at Adelaide University, Hallsworth Visiting Professor University of Manchester, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Cultural Management Shanghai Jiaotong University

The Arc of History

In 2022, UNESCO’s Mondiacult in Mexico City seemed set to re-launch a global cultural policy, a historical arc of progressive policymaking stretching back to its epochal meeting in the same city forty years earlier. The pandemic was behind us, sanity restored in the White House, various green New Deals coming out of Washington, Brussels, and Beijing, and a Secretary-General prepared to reset the UN’s global mission with a Pact for the Future. This was not to be. 

Though commentators across the political spectrum noted the “death of neoliberalism” - that combination of market-first ideology, win-win globalisation and post-political technocratic management - what is replacing it looks very different from an ecological revamping of post-war social democracy. As William Davies wrote recently: “While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a morbid symptom of a dying world, his second looks more like an attempt to enforce a new paradigm”. 

2025’s Mondiacult is happening in a very different world. The Washington Consensus is now long dead. Industrial policy might herald the return of state capacity and coordination, but this is being used as a weapon in an escalating geo-political struggle over access to resources, locked-in markets, promotion of global “state-champions” and “realist” national self-interest. On its 80th Anniversary, the UN was berated at length by an incoherent US President, while the world’s quality press debated whether the UN itself was now as totally irrelevant as the League of Nations. Though Trump did not announce an exit from the UN or its expulsion from US soil, he has already stopped funding UNESCO, cut USAID, and repudiated the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) process. As noted by Adam Tooze, a US letter to the UN stated: 

Although framed in neutral language, Agenda 2030 and the SDGs advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans… Therefore, the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, and it will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course.

This presents an immediate challenge to one of Mondiacult’s signature aspirations, to establish ‘Culture’ as a standalone SDG, just as it does to its under-articulated slogan of “culture as a global public good”. There’s a dire prospect not just of no cultural goal, but maybe no goals at all. 

The first response is to carry on regardless. Though clearly there are headwinds, these will eventually pass. And in a multipolar world, other alliances are possible. So perhaps those in both Global North and Global South who still aspire to universalist values will keep quietly building and hoping for sunnier times. Still, there are some hard questions. Even if a Democrat wins the 2028 US presidential elections, this would inevitably push back the date of the 2030 renegotiation of the SDGs, even more so given the likely carnage in global institutions after four years of Trump. Indeed, why risk adding a culture goal rather than just defending the status quo. And maybe there won’t be goals in the next iteration - if there is a next iteration. At the launch of the new document by the Culture2030Goal Campaign “The Culture Goal: from Necessity to Reality” in Barcelona ahead of Mondiacult 2025, the suggestion was we could have a “shadow goal”, voluntarily added and adhered to by a coalition of the willing, road-testing it whilst the world gets over its craziness. 

“There’s a dire prospect not just of no cultural goal, but maybe no goals at all. ”

But things don’t quite add up with this ‘wait it out’ narrative. First, there’s UNESCO’s forty-year progressive ‘arc of history’, whose origins lay not in the assertive decolonial period of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), but rather after the decisive defeat of that challenge to the Global North in the early 1980s. Second, the idea of sustainable development comes from the 1987 Brundtland Report. This linked continued GDP growth with a renewable “energy transition”, and was co-terminus with the Washington Consensus, the neoliberal order of globalisation that fully took flight after 1990. Free trade and deregulated markets would do the heavy lifting, not governments. UNESCO’s embrace of sustainable development, reaching its high point in 1996’s Our Creative Diversity, sought to put culture at the heart of development, to humanise it. As Pérez De Cuéllar wrote at the time, “culture must be far more than just an aspect or a means of development. . . Rather, it is the end and aim of development when the latter is seen as the flourishing of human existence as a whole”. The sentiment itself is not the issue –I would subscribe to much of it – but rather that the system of market-led sustainable development that it sought to humanise was not questioned. 

UNESCO – and it was by no means alone here – shared the assumption that global development would float all boats, and indeed, that Global South catch-up was the prime purpose of the new global developmental order. Further, that catch-up development could be done sustainably, both in terms of environment and of equity, an aspiration that could only be enhanced if we allowed culture to ‘humanise’ this development. By the early 2000s, “culture as the soul of development” had been replaced by a more instrumentalised notion of ‘cultural and creative industries’. These were ‘enablers’ and ‘drivers’ of growth, but also sustainable because they used the renewables of human creativity – not so much the new oil as the new solar – and because they were uniquely benign industries with capacity building ‘externalities’,  

from reducing poverty through jobs, skills, and employment in the cultural sector, to strengthening quality education for all and social justice, to providing context-relevant responses to foster environmental sustainability. 

“UNESCO’s embrace of sustainable development, reaching its high point in 1996’s Our Creative Diversity, sought to put culture at the heart of development, to humanise it. The sentiment itself is not the issue, but rather that the system of market-led sustainable development that it sought to humanise was not questioned. ”

Promoting such benign renewable industries, UNESCO was able to side-step deep contradictions in this narrative, between Goal 8’s explicit commitment to aggregate global growth, and the other goals concerned with environmental sustainability, such as 6, 12, 13, 14, and 15. So too, they could ignore how development since 1950 had seen a huge explosion of fossil fuel and other resource use – “the great acceleration” – in particular with the emergence of China in the 1990s. The cultural and creative industries were clean, mostly, and, as the good guys, they also fostered environmental consciousness. What cultural policy advocates were less good at talking about were the systemic inequalities endemic to the global economy, including the global cultural economy. But their commitment to the SDGs testified to the expectation that the arc of global development would, ultimately, bend towards global economic justice in a sustainable world. 

The End of Development?

In a recent paper, Adam Tooze argues that the SDGs reframed global development under universal human rights – a shift away from the Global South’s political contestation of the unequal structure of the global political economy. This reframing was part of the US’s hegemonic power, and it worked to turn political contestation into the technocratic management of the global economy by the ‘rules based’ institutions which it dominated. 

Sam Moyn traced an arc in which the emergence in the 1970s of a vision of a world unified under the rule of universal human rights law, went hand in hand with the discrediting of postcolonial development and its promise of national sovereignty. After the end of the Cold War, the ascent of universal human rights as gold standard of international affairs, went hand in hand with the enshrining of the unipolar hegemony of the United States… 

It was, therefore, anything other than coincidental, that the recasting of global development in the key of human rights, which was the accomplishment of the SDGs in 2015, should have gone hand in hand with their stark depoliticization. The SDGs were an extraordinary reduction of the problem of development, which historically is organically linked to questions of collective agency and sovereignty, to a matrix of Performance Indicators. 

This substitution of metrics for politics is, of course, one of the hallmarks of technocratic neoliberalism, and the SDGs,

accumulated a vast set of aspirational targets and technocratic ambitions, summarized in 17 goals and 169 targets…. The hope was that politics and geopolitics could be transcended by a comprehensive grid of targets and colorful infographics. To this day, enthusiasts wear a colorful wheel pin to signal their adherence”. 

What broke the SDGs was not their failures so much as their patchy but significant successes. Like the Millenium Development Goals, they came out of prosperous 1990s, when China was driving indicators of global inequality down, but by the turn of the millennium it was clear that development had stalled across the globe. Countries in Latin America and Africa were experiencing premature de-industrialisation – as China and other East Asian countries expanded manufacturing. Only a few countries – Vietnam and China – managed to follow the “Asian Tigers” and climb out of poverty into middle income countries. This was the other side of the ‘secular stagnation’ - a stubborn lack of investment and growth - experienced by the Global North, especially after the financial crisis 2008-12. In signing the SDGs, rich countries promised to raise billions in global development funds from the private sector, aiming to reboot the stalled development of the Global South. The somewhat unglamourous Goal 17 is a technocratic paean to public-private partnerships, with the state “de-risking” private investment, in what Daniela Gabor called the “Wall Street consensus”. But, Tooze argues, 

Rather than billions leveraging trillions, the track record of blended finance is dismal. It is rare to see more than cents on the dollar mobilized in private money. In key areas of innovation such as green energy and artificial intelligence, the developing world, far from catching up, is left even further behind. 

But it was the rise of China, and its ability to use the global economic order to cash in the promises of development - and actually catch-up - that broke the system. Tooze argues that development is “inherently political. It is about power—the ability to act. A more developed world is, by definition, more multipolar and less controllable”. The challenge posed by China – as with the regional challenges of African states that can now afford the hardware of war, or the threat to the status quo that might be posed by a rich Mexico or burgeoning Brazil – has resulted in a US withdrawal from the “rules-based order”. Biden undid very little of Trump 1.0’s work in this space. Trump 2.0 has simply jettisoned the universalist pieties that went with this order, including the SDGs. And when push comes to shove – such as when Russia invades Ukraine – so too, the rich Europeans slash their aid budgets, just like the US. 

“Tooze argues that development is “inherently political. It is about power—the ability to act. A more developed world is, by definition, more multipolar and less controllable”.”

Culture and the SDGs

In many ways the cultural sector’s engagement with the SDGs is perfectly understandable, as this framework seemed a commitment to universal human rights in accord with the founding principles of the United Nations, and the universalist ideals embedded in humanistic culture. Concerns that these human rights were deeply imbricated in the US-led global order of market-first principles underpinned by a ‘rules-based order’, highly skewed towards the incumbent powers, already voiced in the 1990s, could be evaded by adopting the broadest possible definition of culture. 

Culture may now be said to be the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs. 

As I tried to argue elsewhere, this anthropological definition of “culture as everything”, culture as coterminous with human society, lends itself to the kinds of pieties which Tooze criticises. If we take this broad definition, then it should be clear that cultural policy has extremely limited purchase on this “culture”. It makes claims to relevance based on its purported ownership of large areas of social existence over which it simply has no power - cultural policy’s impact takes a back seat to economic, social, urban, environmental and other areas. Policies aimed at changing ‘whole ways of life’, such as Stalinism, “third world” developmentalism or Thatcher’s consumer revolution rarely work through cultural policy, and indeed have more of an impact on the workings of the cultural sector than vice versa. The ways in which digital technologies are being used to “nudge” and significantly alter online and offline behaviour are now well known. Cultural policy does not own “culture”. It resembles one of those exiled monarchs who still claim to be the legitimate ruler of a country that has already forgotten them. The claim made at the launch of the Culture Goal 2025 in Barcelona - if only there had been a culture goal the SDGs would have hit their target - is overly confident and optimistic.

The human rights turn of culture, while it opened up new ground for cultural diversity and individual empowerment within the unitary frame of sovereign nation states, accepted the neoliberal governance model of the global economic order. This became clear with the “CCI” turn, where cultural capacity building through the mobilising of human creativity, coupled with know-how from Global North cultural agencies, was expected to deliver equitable development. This against all the evidence of the massive and expanding inequality in the global trade in cultural services, as well as the ever-growing global dominance of the platform monopolies. The exception was China, but that was never presented as a viable alternative model, because it so clearly went against the neoliberal nostrums of the creative economy. 

So too the cultural sector was completely captured by its metric dreams. As in many countries, it believed it could gain favour from governments by showing how economically valuable it was - even when it was not- and developing “shadow business models” made up of increasingly far-fetched value-metrics. What Tooze says about the SDGs’ “vast set of aspirational targets and technocratic ambitions” very definitely applied to the cultural sector. UNESCO now has a suite of metrics stretching to the horizon - targets and indicators, diagrams and dashboards, monitoring reports and policy compendia. And we hardly have any explanation for some of the most pressing issues – the persistent lagging behind of the Global South; the expanding dominance of US tech platforms; the evaporation of 2005 Conventions International Fund for Cultural Diversity; the ever-increasing restrictions on mobility of cultural professionals; the faltering of artistic freedoms; the erosion of employment conditions and so on. As Jonathan White describes in his book In the Long Run, this rule by metrics and indicators actively undermines the power of the imagination, our ability to think of a new future. As we look at discourses of culture and the SDGs we see an endless incremental progress from metric to metric, stretching out before us, with no glimpse of what kind of world we are aiming for. Technocratic governance making the future disappear, each report announcing the “eternal return of same” or at least, the slightly tweaked. 

This can be seen at work in the 2005 Convention, which emerged from the work of some highly politicised civil society actors, combined with motivated governments, wanting to challenge the WTO-led global order which would reduce culture to a commodity like any other. Of course, as with any such global agreement, it manifested complex and conflicting interests, but it was a real victory, testifying to the strength of the cultural sector as a globally networked social movement.  But the political goals of the Convention were reduced to a set of ever-more detailed monitoring metrics and reports which charted progress against a dashboard of indicators. The hard political choices involved in actually dealing with a global cultural economy, the technological, legal and financial backbone of which was owned by the Global North (with some East Asian exceptions), were reduced to the anodyne, rights-based notion of “diversity of cultural expressions”. 

Flipping between an anthropological “culture is everything” and the promotion of a CCI growth engine, the global cultural policy agencies get to proclaim universal values whilst turning a blind eye to the real political economy of global culture. The endemic structural barriers to local cultural development; the skewed system of global production and distribution; the highly extractive operations of Global North companies amongst the small businesses and communities in the Global South; the undermining of local state capacity through unequal trade agreements; the predations of global hedge fund capital – these reflect Tooze’s claims more widely about SDGs:

Up front were the mosquito nets, primary education and gender relations, nowhere to be seen were the “centuries of humiliation” and unequal treaties that shaped the question of inequality and poverty in the first place.

The current UNESCO response to the rise of AI is a case in point. Though the ‘tech bros’ were forced to smile and grovel at Trump’s table, they have succeeded in aligning their ambition to completely reboot the economic, social, cultural and politico-administrative structures of the US, Europe and its wider “sphere of interest”, with an atavistic US empire, now jettisoning any universalist principle as antithetic to its interests. In the face of this unprecedented act of infrastructural imperialism UNESCO has set an ethical framework. In the face of mounting evidence of the cultural damage being unleashed by AI we are given the uplands of its beneficial potential “if properly regulated”. Regulated by who exactly? A small person with a red flag standing before an Empire-funded, turbo-charged techno-locomotive hurtling down at full throttle.

A similar question can be asked of ‘culture as a global public good’, which UNESCO adopted as a slogan at Mondiacult 22. They mainly used it, again, to itemise all the benefits culture could bring to the planet. But a global public good refers to the problem of globally provided services – goods – such as financial regulation, environmental protection, heritage preservation, maintaining knowledge commons, peace and security, preparedness for global pandemics and other health risks. These are the global public goods that were always difficult to provide but which are now looking even more shaky. Rodrik talks of a state of anarchy in international relations where,

“global markets are only “weakly embedded”. There is no global anti-trust authority, no global lender of last resort, no global regulator, no global safety nets, and, of course, no global democracy. . .global markets suffer from weak governance, and therefore from weak popular legitimacy”. 

The 2005 Convention, as other such instruments around various forms of heritage protection, is a global public good. It had a global authority – politically weak maybe, undermined on all sides, but with strong legitimacy drawn from its civil society origins – in which questions of global equity and structural inequality in the political economy of culture could be addressed. But it became a monitoring device for a floats-all-boats creative economy which was expected to deliver market-oriented growth. Adam Tooze again:

We are not in a world in which the future is mapped either in terms of universal norms or brightly colored SDG targets and cute infographics. The more primal and urgent imperative driving development both at the individual and collective level is not so much the quest for rights but the will to power—power over resources, purchasing power, the ability to resist the influence of others, to have security but also, if possible, to assert one’s own zone of control. Development in this sense is not just about ticking boxes and chasing targets; it is inherently and necessarily political and geopolitical. 

Culture should aspire to universalist ideals, but if it fails to acknowledge the above – that power is present in the field of culture just as elsewhere, as all practicing art and cultural workers know - then it is acting irresponsibly, even recklessly.

The Culture Goal

What of the Culture Goal, unveiled here in Barcelona at the weekend? The rationale for a specific goal, as presented here, does not derive from the need to promote that specific area of social life we might call “culture”. Rather it is concerned with the anthropological definition of culture - ‘culture as everything’, including norms, values, behaviours, traditions, language, you name it - which underpins all the goals, because everything is cultural. A specific goal is needed to better allow co-ordination of culture’s input into each and every goal, and making it mandatory for governments and agencies to pay attention and, hopefully, direct resources to it. 

Made up of 8 targets, the draft goal is essentially a cultural right-based proposal which has little to say about the actual cultural sector or its global political economy. Though it mentions artist mobility and working conditions of cultural workers, and is concerned with cultural heritage, the only area which deals with the cultural sector per se is Target #4, which is written entirely under the sign of “cultural and creative industries”. The rest of the targets are about cultural rights already enshrined in numerous UN conventions and legally binding agreements – or about vague, unspecifiable targets around promoting cultures of peace and global citizenship, or new forms of ‘regenerative’ ecosystemic governance. That is, a combination of “motherhood and apple pie” (global peace), underspecified concepts (what exactly is ‘global citizenship’?) and vague ambitions to use “regenerative” culture “to rethink environmental protection, sustainable urbanisation, land planning, landscape management, biodiversity stewardship, agriculture and natural areas management”. The word here is hubris.

The 4th target resolves to ‘support the development of dynamic cultural and creative sectors”, “safeguard intangible heritage” and “facilitate access to diverse cultural expressions in digital environments”. But here lies the vast bulk of the cultural sector – commercial and publicly funded, digital and analogue, consumption and production, arts and entertainment. It covers film and TV, computer games, radio, music streaming, live performances, oral and written fictions, festivals, museums, the technological infrastructures on which they depend, the education and skills necessary, the trades agreements and contracting around IP. That is, the whole complex cultural sector. What most people understand when you say “culture” is consigned to this one goal with no specifications other than the most bloodless. So “facilitate access to diverse cultural expressions in digital environments” – this in the face of the global onslaught of the tech bros. 

The proposed Culture Goal is basically a wish list of the cultural sector, distilled over the last couple of decades, and squeezed into the shape of an SDG. The pragmatics are understandable. We must use the technocratic language of targets and indicators, don’t frighten the horses, keep it neutral. Yet what is actually aimed at will be of little use to those providing and enjoying culture, because it speaks of culture being that which underlies all human society. In contrast, a document like the Porto Santo Charter, outlines some very clear, basic issues concerning culture as we access and experience it. A culture goal which is set so broad as to miss the actual culture sector is not one that ought to command the global efforts of the policy sector. 

The means for obtaining this comprehensive global cultural policy is a set of broad targets and indicators. There is no strategic vision of how these might be implemented. “Facilitate access to diverse cultural expressions in digital environments”. How? Abolish Facebook, Meta, Amazon etc. “Introduce regenerative development”. How? Convince the German and Chinese concrete industries to go green. Talk about turning up to a gun fight with a spreadsheet.

In many ways the culture goal confirms Trump's suspicions – trying to smuggle in a left-progressive idea of culture under the cover of sustainable development. That idea might be a good thing – I’d sign for it – but the game is up. The SDGs have been called out. Culture is not going to be smuggled in disguised as a set of technical indicators. There’s a strong chance the SDGs are gone now, and perhaps that’s a good thing. The SDGs were “hypocritical”, and as Tooze’s byline goes, “the West’s aid model was always a mirage. It’s time for a realistic alternative”. 

Time to Rethink

This might come across as cruel, even nihilist. I am neither, but these are brutal times. Perhaps the readers might think I am overwhelmed by the moment (I am) but surely this is time “for a realistic alternative”. We can no longer tie our hopes to the flag of technocratic indicators, a depoliticised process that was never going to work, and never did. A goal for culture was a gambit, rational perhaps, as the status of culture, and the funding accorded it, constantly declined. Here was a chance to re-establish it as the heart of sustainable development. That boat has now sailed. What’s the realistic alternative? 

“So we have to approach culture  more like the water and gender goals, or better still, education and health, clear, targeted, specific, not sprawlingly cross-cutting the whole SDGs. ”

Well, that would have come from a collective effort, and would require a forum in which we could return to some first principles, fresh debates, fresh ideas outside the world of sustainable development and the sprawling bureaucracies which have proliferated around them. The civil society forums on global cultural policy have been marginalised, stage-managed, corralled. What would a global social movement for culture look like? A coalition for cultural diversity in a new age? One led out of Africa, South and Central America, South and East Asia. They will not be galvanised into action by a culture goal, I don’t think, but a culture vision. What would that look like? 

I have five general ideas, to get started.

First, uncouple culture from the rhetoric of “drivers” and “enablers” of the economy. Culture is not an industry, not a tool or driver, but part of the foundations of liveable societies. Note: part of the foundations not THE foundation. So we have to approach culture  more like the water and gender goals, or better still, education and health, clear, targeted, specific, not sprawlingly cross-cutting the whole SDGs. The right to culture requires resources, infrastructures, that allow access to, and the capabilities required for, a full participation in the cultural life of the community. The rationale for providing these is not about a “diverse and dynamic” CCI sector nor but a diverse and dynamic cultural sector. These cultural infrastructures should be present in any liveable community and in many places they are absent. We need a basic cultural infrastructure programme targeted at the most needful places, and this goes well beyond the kinds of economic indicators currently used to assess the ‘health’ (i.e. economic viability) of the CCI sector. 

Second, assert digital cultural sovereignty as a matter of urgency. Providing the finance, skills, legal structures and capabilities for developing countries, or groups of countries, to push back against colonisation of their digital infrastructure – and the natural resource extractions (especially water for coolant) which accompany these. To help them develop their own digital infrastructure. Not digital nationalism – which is impossible for many countries on their own - but a collaborative and democratic digital sovereignty. Perhaps a pragmatic alliance with regional agencies such as the EU and (worth exploring) China could help develop this for mutual advantage. But without this sovereignty the benefits of any digital and AI induced development – which includes CCI – will accrue to the US (and in some cases China), re-enforcing dependence. This means identifying blocks of players able to build the digital infrastructure, as an open public service. This will involve not just investment but also strong regulatory intervention against predatory platforms. It seeks to provide robust digital infrastructure that can protect national cultural sovereignty, not as a proto- export industry but as part of the cultural life and identity of that country.

Third, protecting creative ecosystems from the real threats they face. Whilst we know the devastating impact of development on the natural and non-human worlds, the impact on creative ecosystems is nowhere registered in the culture goal. Promoting “diverse and dynamic creative and cultural sectors” gets nowhere near the challenges faced by local and regional arts and cultural sectors in the Global North and South. These ecosystems, many of which are ravaged by extractive digital companies, real estate development, declining working conditions, exploitative platform companies as well as the large top-down media and cultural infrastructure developments which local rulers use to show their commitment to the creative economy and the promise of global development. Small and Medium Sized enterprises are not to be valued for their ‘scalability’ but for their connection to place, to “making a living” by making access to culture possible and meaningful. What new principles might we develop to think about healthy cultural ecosystems, a real commitment to cultural diversity outside CCI development bromides?  

“Whilst we know the devastating impact of development on the natural and non-human worlds, the impact on creative ecosystems is nowhere registered in the culture goal. ”

Fourth - targeted networks of trade, mobility, and co-operation. Yes, to enhance markets, because that’s how much of culture is made and consumed, but also as a contribution to flourishing societies, not an abstract ‘sustainable development’. We need to take advantage of the new multipolar world. Universal ideals are still valid but they won’t be brought in by a generic commitment to a broad set of aggregate development targets and indicators but by multi-national agreements around shared and specific objectives. This is not to reject the UN principles but to recognise that, at the moment, it does not command anything like the compliance it once did. The cultural sector needs to develop its own national-regional partnerships around specific priorities and projects, the global agencies helping to broker these. Those countries in the Global North which are still committed to culture and development need to develop programmes that are targeted at basic cultural infrastructures, digital sovereignties, healthy cultural ecosystems and fair trade. Perhaps we can’t get global buy-in, but nation states (and the EU) still have power if they are willing to use it, in a post-unipolar world.

Fifth, re-assert the central role of the state, and associations of states, in the development of the cultural sector, which is an essential partner for the broader commons of the cultural ecosystem. The default to the market, global finance and NGOs as the key players in global development has been a mistake. Taking back control of the cultural infrastructure and the command centres of the cultural economy in the name of the sovereign national interest, often dismissed in the 1990s as autarchic protectionism, needs to be put back on the table as an option. The assertion of the role of the state and the national interest is not in contradiction to international collaboration or indeed, the provision of the global public goods of good governance.  Rather, it provides a firm basis for it.

“The assertion of the role of the state and the national interest is not in contradiction to international collaboration or indeed, the provision of the global public goods of good governance.  ”

Conclusion

We don’t know how “global development” will go. It might turn into something more complex, region specific, involving different combinations of actors. Hopefully other countries – China? – will step in to fill the gap left by the nihilists in Washington, because there are people highly dependent on the aid that used to come from the Global North. People die without it or lead squalid lives. But we can’t expect this to be an automatic process generated via a bunch of SDGS, it will take hard, locally driven work and it demands enhanced state capacity not just NGOs + de-risked Global Finance. It will require politics. 

Culture and politics is always a complex mix, and many get their fingers burned. But all of these aspirations for culture require political will, not technocratic management. So we have to show why culture is important for politics, why it contributes to liveable societies and empowered citizens, rather than continue to employ a whole phalanx of consultants who will show, with metrics, how it contributes to GDP. Whatever comes from this moment of crisis, the end of culture’s depoliticisation might be one of the positives.