Mondiacult

UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development: MONDIACULT 2022 (Mexico, September 28-30, 2022) – fragments of the final declaration, which is one of the key documents on which cooperation within the UNESCO Creative Cities Network is based today.

FRAGMENTS OF THE FINAL DECLARATION

We call for strengthening the role and adapting our cultural policies to the challenges of the present day by effectively implementing the relevant UNESCO conventions and recommendations, in particular by engaging more diverse stakeholders in more systematic participatory activities – from national and local participants, through cultural institutions, civil society institutions, professional networks and experts, to interested communities – to activate their transformative potential through the exchange of good practices.

We reiterate our call for the protection of cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, and for free expression, especially in times of crisis involving extreme climatic events and natural hazards, and we condemn actions against culture in the context of armed conflicts, as well as the use of cultural infrastructure and its surroundings for military purposes, and we support efforts to implement norms and standards of international law.

We emphasize the importance of introducing the topic of cultural heritage and creativity into international discussions on climate change due to their multifaceted impact on the protection of all forms of cultural heritage and the recognition of the role of culture in climate action, in particular through traditional and indigenous belief systems.

We strongly support the sustainable development of the cultural and creative industries to support Member States’ creative economies through the effective implementation of the 2005 UNESCO Convention and 1980 Recommendations; inter alia, by guaranteeing the social and economic rights of artists and cultural workers, supporting their mobility and better regulating digital platforms and their use in participatory dialogue, and we call on UNESCO to support member countries in the use of digital transformation in the cultural sector.

We call on the UN Secretary-General to firmly consolidate the position of culture as a common good and to include it as an end in itself in the development agenda reaching beyond the 2030 borderline, and to achieve this goal, we ask the UNESCO Director-General to initiate broad – involving Member States, civil society, academia and the private sector – consultations on the multifaceted impact of culture as a common good on our societies, as well as to support the idea of including culture as a topic of the UN Future Summit planned for 2024, repeating UNESCO’s founding mandate stating that the organization is to “create peace in the minds of men and women” by strengthening social justice and guaranteeing human dignity.