This text was originally written at the request of Vicki-Ann Ware and published as the Foreword to the Routledge Handbook of Arts and Global Development, edited by Vicki-Ann Ware, Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta, Tim Prentki, Wasim al Kurdi, and Patrick Kabanda, Routledge, 2025
Click here to download this text in PDF format: Culture is Development (2024)
What role does culture play in development? That is a difficult question to answer because its central terms are complex and contested. Culture and development (or culture in development) can be approached from different perspectives. For example, it is now widely accepted that the cultures—taken to mean beliefs about the world and human behaviour—of both donor and recipient affect the goals and outcomes of their cooperation. At the same time, culture, especially in the form of the arts, is also seen as a resource through which to secure other development goals, such as health promotion, human rights or economic activity. And for many, culture is a good in itself, a form of self-expression through which people can find the agency and dignity that are intrinsic to human development itself.
All these connections between culture and development exist and are considered in this book. They might be thought to map a spectrum of current practice, but culture has more potential even than this. In particular, it is a territory where the relationships that define development itself could be reimagined and aligned more fruitfully with the complex challenges of a vulnerable, interdependent world.
Inequality is the foundation of development. It is the unequal conditions of life experienced by people in different places that make it necessary. Reducing that inequality—which in practice means reducing suffering and early death—is morally right and politically wise, but how can it be done without upholding the same inequality that motivates development? In the very act of giving, the donor reinforces the power differential between themselves and the recipient. Aid is always conditional, the terms of its use and evaluation of its results controlled by the donor. That is not only an expression of the donor’s power to reduce their support, as the British government has done since 2020[i], or even withdraw it entirely. It also reflects the inequalities (real or perceived) between the donor’s and recipient’s capabilities that define their relationship. When Jane Jacobs wrote that ‘development cannot be given’, she offered a critical insight into the nature of that relationship.[ii] It cannot be given because development is a process: it must be done. But that is not only because human development is enabled in action. It is also because giving cannot overcome inequality.
The persistence of inequality has contributed to a rejection, on both sides of the political spectrum, of the very idea of progress, and therefore of development.[iii] It is true that progress is rarely straightforward, and often corrupted by power, but such difficulties do not make it less necessary or real. For most people, human life is easier and longer than it has ever been. Despite egregious breaches and injustices, human rights are better protected than they were. Development exists to extend such gains to all. The problem lies not in whether it is possible but in the expectation that progress should be linear and controllable. The log frame, useful as it is in the evaluation of development programmes, is the very expression of that belief. If you do this, that will follow. But for some time now, these structured, mechanistic models have been giving way to more organic ideas of complex interdependent systems, where, as the scientist Neil Theise says, ‘the whole is unpredictably greater than the sum of its parts’.[iv] Culture works with unpredictability more easily than policy or management and it has insights to offer them.
Unfortunately, linear thinking still dominates and for many policy makers and development workers culture is at the end of the line. There will be time to consider it once security, sanitation, health and infrastructure are in place. Consciously or not, they follow Abraham Maslow’s 80-year old concept of human needs as a progression from physical and social needs to cultural and spiritual ones. The irony, of course, is that this is itself a deeply cultural idea, rooted in its time and place Manfred Max-Neef’s alternative is also cultural but it is wiser and more useful:
Human needs must be understood as a system: that is, all human needs are inter-related and interactive. With the sole exception of the need of subsistence, that is, to remain alive, no hierarchies exist within the system.[v]
In a world where everything happens at once and affects everything else, culture is connected with and integral to every other dimension of development. It is not the cherry in the cake. It is how the cake is made, and why it is a cake at all (the metaphor itself is cultural, rooted in time and place). For experts such as John Clammer culture is integral to human development, enabling its processes and giving it meaning, purpose and shape.
What is equally important is the development of culture: the deliberate enhancing of cultural resources, capabilities, education and career opportunities that give meaning, depth, dignity, and sense of cultural rootedness, while safeguarding cultural diversity, and accepting that artistic creativity can spill over into many other areas of social, cultural, political, and economic life. [vi]
It is such a belief that underlies the policy of the Swiss Federation to assign a minimum of one percent of its international aid budget to cultural programmes.[vii] Many development programmes are matters of life and death; culture is not, even if it can be exploited to fuel division and conflict. Cultural projects are meeting grounds, spaces of exchange, where listening and watching are valued as much as speaking, where exploration opens possibilities of learning and change, where uncertainty is unthreatening, where right and wrong are rules to be tested not enforced, where the least considered person may have the best ideas, where the whole is unpredictably greater than the sum of the parts.
This is not fiction or idealism. I recently listened to a group of Haitian artists talk about their work in theatre, film, festivals, music and visual art. It mattered, they explained, not despite the shortages and insecurity of daily life but because of them. Through culture, they defended the values of learning, shared experience and the riches of Haitian culture when they were under threat. Their courage was impressive but so was their confidence that their creative skills and cultural resources were protecting the present and building the future.
The distinctive quality of culture in development is its capacity to redefine the unequal relations between donor and recipient. The days when the great powers saw their culture as a gift to less fortunate people are passing, if not yet past. Now, if culture is recognised in development, it is increasingly because it is a local resource and then it is the donor who is at a disadvantage because everyone is the world expert in their own culture. There really is nothing that an external agency can say about how people’s own cultural resources can support the development process. On the contrary, they must empower their partners in development to apply their knowledge in decision-making about cultural programmes. If donors cannot trust recipients to make decisions about their own culture, where risk is insignificant, where will they offer trust?
And development without trust is no development at all.
[i] Philip Loft & Philip Brien, UK aid: Spending reductions since 2020 and outlook from 2023, House of Commons Library, 2 August 2023 www.commonslibrary.parliament.uk
[ii] Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, Vintage, New York,1984, p. 119
[iii] Susan Neiman, Left is not Woke, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2023, p.92ff
[iv] Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity, A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness and Being, Spiegel & Grau, New York, 2023, p. 30
[v] Manfred Max-Neef et al., 1989, ‘Human Scale Development: An Option for the Future’, Development Dialogue, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation 1989:1, p. 19
[vi] John Clammer, 2015, Art, Culture and International Development, Humanising Social Transformation, Routledge, Abingdon p. 139
[vii] https://www.eda.admin.ch/publikationen/en/deza/diverse-publikationen/Politik-Kultur-und-Entwicklung-der-DEZA.html
François Matarasso 