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Conclusion

As we have seen in this chapter, an integrated sustainability discourse arose in the late1990s

and early 2000s, or better still, was part of a heterogeneous ensemble I am calling a

sustainability assemblage. This discourse introduced the importance of culture, specifically

cultural diversity, to global environmental governance, and as a means to address no less than

the future of the earth. Bennett’s framework of the culture complex has helped me trace the

diverse institutional spaces and areas of expertise that were part of building a discourse that

reflexively focused on culture: defining and mobilising culture in the context of

environmental dilemmas that were increasingly being acknowledged as multidimensional. I

traced the use of the term culture across several global UN meetings and their subsequent

papers, and also how culture became articulated as the fourth pillar of sustainability both in

an Australian and a global policy context. Definitions of culture that emerged were specific,

and identified indigenous and traditional cultures as representative of cultural diversity. Even

more specifically, these definitions created a link between cultural diversity and biological

diversity through the notion of ecological knowledge and diverse modes of managing the

st
th
environment. I have suggested that within the period of the late 20 and early 21 centuries a
universal ethic of cultural diversity emerged, and cultural diversity was framed as offering

solutions to the multiple issues that had been brought to the table – environmental

degradation, climate change, poverty, food security, rights to resources, and loss of culture

and heritage. The integrative concept of sustainability thus emerged through this milieu as a

dynamic solution to a multitude of problems.

I have made a link between the discussions of culture at this global political level and

an academic revival of nature/culture debates. I have argued that in this same period, with the

backdrop of environmental devastation and growing critiques of the limits to western

scientific knowledge, a similar interest in cultural diversity was emerging in social science

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