Our creative diversity

Development divorced from its human  or cultural context is growth without a soul. Economic development in its full flowering is part of a people's culture.

This is not a view commonly held. A more conventional view regards culture as either a help or a hindrance to economic development, leading to the call to take "cultural factors into account in development". But the argument advanced in this 1998 report is that development embraces not only access to goods and services, but also the opportunity to choose a full, satisfying, valuable and valued way of living together, the flourishing of human existence in all its forms and as a whole.

Warning: this 292 page report is 21.1 MB