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the sustainability concept is its insistence on interconnections and interdependencies’ (Gibson

2006, p. 266), on the flip side the core problem of the sustainability project is the very same

preoccupation with interconnections and interdependencies. Acts of mobilising culture are

also acts of defining culture. I therefore analyse the particular concepts of culture that have

materialised and the processes of making and unmaking concepts of culture across diverse

institutional setting. My aim is to tease out the reflexive ways that culture was put to use

within environmental governance and how it emerged in relation to other categories, such as

nature, society and economy and was translated into global policy arenas. I am particularly

interested in the way that culture has been used to argue for pluralism in relation to ecological

cosmologies and environmental management.

In a similar way that the project of multiculturalism was what John Frow and

Meaghan Morris (1993, p. ix) call a ‘compromise formation’ that shrouds contradictions and

differentiations within a community, the discourse of cultural diversity on a global level

espouses compromises. To unpack these compromises I draw on the work of Tony Bennett,

who argues that culture is a ‘conceptual universal’ along with other sets of conceptual

universals – e.g. nature, economy, society – which should be historicised (2013, pp. 11-12). I

draw on Bennett’s historicising of the concept of culture through his proposal of the “culture

complex”, which encompasses a broader range of knowledge practices and institutions in the

governance of conduct’ (2013, p. 24). Bennett looks at the historic assemblage of culture and

the ‘role played by epistemological authorities of various kinds in producing new

collectivities of actors and endowing these with specific capacities for acting on and changing

conduct’ (2013, p. 26). This is way of analysing culture not simply as a complex of behavior

patterns but as a set of control mechanisms, in which culture becomes conceptualised as

differentiated from the economy, politics and law, and understood as a ‘particular “sphere” of

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