Page 100 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

Cultural diversity is again important to this position and as Apadurai argues ‘guarantees

sustainability because it binds universal development goals to plausible and specific moral

visions’ (Appadurai 2003, p. 16). He adds to this by saying that:

Biodiversity, in the long run, also relies on the maximum diversity of such moral
visions, since by definition, biodiversity requires the proliferation and protection
of many ecological regimes and environmental balances. (Appadurai 2003, p. 16)

Here cultural diversity is not only modelled on biodiversity (in this case moral diversity

rather than biological diversity), it offers a solution for the continuation of humanity through

ensuring biodiversity (Appadurai 2003, p. 16). There are a few more points to highlight from

this quote. First, a moral vision of globalisation was forwarded, and secondly, that at the heart

of the question of cultural diversity was an assumption that globalisation equals

homogenisation and destruction.

Over a decade on and the sentiments of the late 1990s and early 2000s echo at a

global level. The UN and its various offshoots continue to be the main institutional force

behind these global debates (see Ashe 2014; Abrell et al. 2009; UNESCO 2012;

Agenda21Culture n.d.). The value of cultural diversity, which both Hawkes and the

roundtable articulated, continues to define the four-pillar model of sustainability and as such,

sustainability has developed into a kind of moral compass, playing a definitive role in a new

42
cultural value: the value of cultural diversity itself .

Several issues arise in relation to the cultural diversity agenda. The first issue is that a

paradox is presented within the proposal of a universal value of cultural diversity. By

promoting cultural diversity as a universal value of sustainability the notion of diversity is

itself undermined. That is, if incongruity exists between diverse values then the value of

diversity is compromised and so is the proposition of sustainability. The second issue, which

I elaborate on in the next chapter in relation to the term sustainability, concerns who in this

88