Introduction, Special Issue 'Development, Democracy and Culture'.

• Author: Clammer, John

Of the several academic events and intellectual encounters that were responsible for the theme of this special issue, we will only name one, where John Clammer was a visiting international fellow at the Warwick University Institute of Advanced Study during the summer of 2018. It was during this time we collaborated on many seminars, some of which were generously sponsored by the Warwick Research Priority in International Development (now the Warwick Institute of Interdisciplinary Research in International Development, the prime sponsor of this journal). One of the sponsored seminars concerned the continued significance of UNESCO's discourse on 'Culture and Development'. It discussed how that discourse (principally, on the relation between culture, democratisation and development) continues, but, has become of secondary importance to the principle subject of the UN 2005 Convention--diversity and intercultural relations through creative economy and its spectrum of supporting policies.

While the 2005 Convention had its origins in the admirable political motivation (largely on the part of France and Canada) to protect cultural production from the increasingly liberalised global economy, it nonetheless contributed to a reframing of global cultural policy with reference to the UNCTAD-devised [United Nations Conference on Trade and Development] framework of Creative Economy. While it would be wrong to assert that culture and development policies were henceforth displaced by more specific policy aspirations for the creative industries--indeed, the 2005 Convention foregrounds interculturalism and international cooperation--it does mean that the growing recognition of the interrelation of culture and democracy is no longer central to UNESCO (as it was at the time of the Convention's origins in the 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity). Indeed, it is no longer central to the many strategic international cultural relations organisations (like the British Council), to NGOs, to city authorities (such as Creative City projects), or to the UNDP (United Nations Development Project). And this has many implications, notably for the stunted intellectual project of 'pluralism' (central to UNESCO's landmark 1996 Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development (now dissolved), Our Creative Diversity; the 1999 publication of Towards a Constructive Pluralism (UNESCO, 1999), and Boutros Boutros-Ghali's edited book-length report The Interaction between Democracy and Development (UNESCO, 2002)). A primary implication, we would argue, is the decreasing international profile of cultural policy itself--as a necessary component of any socially-informed and sustainable approach to development. Cultural policies have tended to become supplementary to creative industries, economy or urban development policies. This, unfortunately, lessens the urgency of the recognition of rights in the realm of culture, the capacity for inclusion and the cultivation of citizenship, along with political participation (of promoting the civic order and association, and of the quality of urban and public cultural life). Cultural policy, as a political enterprise, maintain a broader historical claim on the public realm and social life, which are arguably not intrinsic to economic or urban policies. Indeed, it is surely possible to implement most of the 2005 Convention without being troubled by the question of democracy itself, or the intrinsic role human freedom and expression in democratic life.

This Special Issue has, implicit within it, an aim to promote what one may refer to as a 'democratic culture', or a quality of cultural life (production, management, policy framing) that articulates the necessary conditions for both self and collective actualisation (or, in terms of a pluralist theory of democracy, the actualisation of the self through collective self-determination). The papers of this special issue are thus both broad-based and focused: they span cultural policy, sustainable development, creative economy, creative cities, contemporary art, civil society and cultural rights. When we invited the various contributors, we did so because of the way that each of their very different approaches to cultural research nonetheless encircled critical issues internal to the problem of democracy. And we define democracy as a problem, and not simply an object of analysis, a theory of government, or a self-evident and ethically superior way of organising society. As we have witnessed in the UK, throughout Europe and the world, the rise of populists claiming to represent the authentic will of the people, has thrown into some disarray established and normative notions on democracy we have taken for granted (indeed, since the post-Second World War settlement that saw the rise of the UN system and its institutions).

The word 'democracy' naturally conjures up images of the ballot box, and of the relatively representative political forms and institutions of Western Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan and other societies that have followed a basically liberal model of governance such as India. The concept tends, in other words, to be read as a broad political one, without much reference to either its sociological or cultural underpinnings, expressions and manifestations. India, which likes to bill itself as 'the...