Towards Cultural Citizenship:

Cultural policy is increasingly central to national and international agendas. While it originally grew out of identification of and concern with the conditions in a fairly narrowly defined cultural sector, it is now a mainstream policy issue. Today the challenges, the opportunities and the responsibilities of cultural policy are changing, broadening, and connecting with economic, social and environmental policy.

Cultural policy, that is to say, is about the fundamental human right of citizenship and the fundamental human objective of sustainable development. That was - and is -the basic message in Our Creative Diversity (1995) and in the Stockholm Action Plan, adopted at UNESCO -Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Human Development -The Power of Culture - in Stockholm in 1998. Culture can no longer only or mainly be restricted to the opera house or gallery - "the arts" - but must be looked upon and treated as a basic driving force behind human behaviour and central to human development.

The book is a result of a project initiated and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), in cooperation with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, the Swedish Ministry of Culture, the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO and the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs. The book is addressed to a number of constituencies to policy makers and practitioners in the field of culture and development, to institutional and community-based researchers, to stake-holders in the cultural field in the broadest sense.