ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some of the specific contributions that were made by the World Decade for Cultural Development, focusing on its standard-setting report Our Creative Diversity. It describes the ways in which the Decades work was initially taken up, lost in translation or simply ignored within frameworks of international development, looking in particular at the work of the World Bank and the emergence of the post-Washington Consensus. The book retraces the path of reform and depoliticisation that was taken at UNESCO between MONDIACULT in 1982 and the Stockholm conference of 1998. Our Creative Diversity was primarily intended as an appeal to bring culture in from the margins and give it a more central place in contemporary strategies of development and international intervention. Opening up the last frontier of development therefore meant opening the practices of development up to an expanded repertoire of concerns and expertise. Society's ritual base is modernized to fit into and serve its political and economic ends.
