Abstract

Why is it that concerns about cultural development during the 1990s failed to stir the collective imagination as the environment had done? Environmental groups continue to stress the economic consequences of failure to take action; however, increasing evidence that cultural factors play a significant role in economic life seems hardly to have affected the way priorities are set in national and international policy-making. This paper suggests that building a theory of cultural sustainability along similar lines to the theory of ecological sustainability provides a way of bringing culture “in from the cold” and locating it as a mainstream concern in thinking about how the contemporary economy works and how economic development needs to be understood in the future. It draws attention to parallels between the processes of ecological and cultural development that can help to illuminate the relationship between culture and the economy and provide for an integrating framework within which to see sustainable development in both environmental and cultural terms.