Zimbabwe should exploit the gains of culture on development
“CULTURE is the be all and end all of development” L S Senghor, poet (Senegal, 1906-2001).
A decade and two later, I find it prudent to introduce one of the pertinent and urgent conversations that should influence developmental frameworks.
The conversation for the year shall be mainly on developmental discourse tampering on the contestations of conceptualisation of development, policy framing and arguments by colleagues using home grown contexts and suggestions on developmental progress tailor-made to communities we live in and Zimbabwe broadly.
In 2008, the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) was concise when it indicated at the beginning of its State of World Population Report that culture is and always has been central to development.
As a natural and fundamental dimension of people’s lives, culture must be integrated into development policy and programming in Zimbabwe.
In the Basic Needs Approach, the State is expected to create an enabling environment for economic, political and social prosperity. Admittedly, the Zimbabwean Government is faced with a myriad of tasks, chief among them is how to foster development when the scourges of climate change are tolling, international politics is rapidly fracturing and affecting domestic policies in developing economies and polities, modernity (contested development) is both improving lives and massively effecting a paradigm shift on labour fronts; one key demand (employment) by the citizenry.
With this backdrop, I find the issue of culture and development as a less exploited avenue that can significantly salvage livelihoods in this country.
Over the last few decades there has been greater study into the concept of development, including not only indicators like economic growth or production, but also incorporating factors currently considered essential for full development, a non-linear development, and conceived as a complex process involving different fields and characteristics.
The concept of Human Development, promoted on the international level by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and Amartya Sen, includes education and health as key factors in human development, which is defined as increasing the capacities of each person and thereby placing the person at the centre of the development action.
One of the reasons why culture has not been exploited for development in Zimbabwe and many other developing economies is because of the lack of an agreed definition; the problem is not academically limited but stretches to public policy making constraints (political language vocabulary in-equivalence). The theoretical lack of definition of culture also led to it being excluded from the development policies, given that, as one Rubens Bayardo states, there are many readings and different approaches to the notion of culture, and the problem is what is included and what is excluded from it.
In this article I shall use a broad definition of culture, deriving from the definition from Mondiacult (1982) and used by Unesco, which integrates the cultural expressions, as specific manifestations of the cultures. Hence, culture is that which offers the context, values, subjectivity, attitudes and skills on which the development process must take place.
This definition of culture also includes the idea of the complementary nature of the cultures, their dynamism and the generation of culture identities which are not mutually exclusive.
Thus, culture is not a static set of values and practices: it is constantly recreated as people question, adapt and redefine their values and practices when faced with changes and the interchange of ideas.
What should inform developmental policy-making from here-on is that development, as overcoming poverty, must be a broad and holistic concept which must incorporate the concept of cultural development. In turn, one must remember the large potential of the work on cultural wealth as it provides a vision of wealth to communities which are always seen as “poor” from the international co-operation perspective, which normally has a more classic concept of poverty (uncovered basic needs).
Development and co-operation actions are intrinsically linked to the funds, resources and times of politics and its administrations, and as such this issue must also be considered when it comes to considering the possibilities of dealing with cultural processes in development.
Here we should speak about cultural indications as there are more and more international, regional and local bodies which point out the need to measure the impact of the development processes through quantifiable and comparable indicators.
But again, we must be aware that it is very difficult to measure the cultural impact on any action merely by taking quantitative and qualitative indicators, but at the same time, indicators can provide clues for impact.
In all of this process, the first thing to do would be to make sure that culture forms part of political language. Pointing out the importance of transforming cultural diversity into a transversal vector of public policies is to accept the difficulty of measuring in the short term.
Despite everything stated up to now, we can now talk about a process towards the precision of cultural policies as priority actions in development and we can state, with certain optimism, that there is a gradual process to consolidate this sector of co-operation.
Various international bodies (among others United Nations, with Unesco as the reference in this area) and public and private organisations (like Amagugu International Heritage Trust, etc) have made significant progress in this area through the reflections, documents and actions to demonstrate and illustrate to potential of culture on driving sustainable development to be precise.
This progress provides a basic theoretical corpus and already indicates some of the priority actions within the framework of culture and development, like for example the cultural industries or the special attention to intangible heritage and linguistic diversity, among others.
On 21 May 2008, on the celebration of the World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, Koichiro Matsuura, then Director-General of Unesco, emphasised that the current situation then, invited the world to demonstrate that cultural diversity is a driving force behind sustainable development and therefore a decisive instrument in the fight against poverty. His assertion is still as important as then.
One of the greatest mistakes that was done in tooling development through MDGs was the exclusion of culture as a bedrock yet it was essential for them to be achieved and culture is treated in low volume if not muted in the SDGs.
While the Government of Zimbabwe dedicates an entire ministry and a budget line to financing culture, and there are visible leanings to react to international events on tangible and intangible cultural heritage, the motive is absent of the “GDP potential” and how commercialisation of cultural economies is central to development even through economic or “modernity” indicators.