Sustainable development and cultural capital

Abstract

It has become common for countries to create a framework of sustainable development indicators (SDI) to measure progress in raising the social, economic and environmental well-being of their regional and national communities. Standard practice is to focus on changes in stock measures of physical capital, financial capital, human capital, natural capital and social capital. An unusual feature of New Zealand’s approach is that it pays explicit attention to cultural well-being alongside social, economic and environmental well-being. This practice raises important issues about how measures related to cultural well-being can be incorporated into a national SDI framework. The research for this report explored whether cultural capital is best conceptualised as a component of social capital, or whether it warrants treatment as a separate category. In arguing for the latter the report proposes that cultural capital be defined as a community’s embodied cultural skills and values, in all their community-defined forms, inherited from the community’s previous generation, undergoing adaptation and extension by current members of the community, and desired by the community to be passed on to its next generation.