Exploring the Links between Culture and Development: New Challenges for Cultural Indicators in the European Union

This chapter reviews the EU experience of cultural statistics and indicators and discusses the main international initiatives trying to measure the impact of culture on development. The focus goes first on the most important international text linking culture to development, that is the 2005 unesco Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Then, the chapter analyses two ‘measurement’ projects that have been recently carried out in this field: the unesco Culture for Development Indicators and the World Tourism Organisation’s Sustainable Tourism Indicators. The comparative analysis of the two initiatives shows that the use of soft-law instruments like indicators present a high valuable way to subtly impose on states a shared view on the cultural policies to be implemented, even in fields where there is no political agreement. In this way, indicators prove to be an indispensable complement to traditional hard law measures like international law Conventions: Through a soft-law, bottom-up approach directly involving interested stakeholders, they help exactly where international law Conventions turn out to be most weak, i.e. in the implementation process. This leads to some remarks about the possible contribution that the transplant of these models could give to current and future EU’s actions regarding culture and culture heritage.