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institutions (even if recommendations have not been adopted in policy), and that in social
science fields there was an “environmental turn”. Yet, as I argue, both (cultural turn in
environmental management and environmental turn in social science fields) came to similar
conclusions: that cultural diversity can expand the intellectual, philosophic and practical
reservoirs of environmental management, and that traditional and indigenous knowledge is
essential to the qualities of cultural diversity.
Three paradoxes arise from these turns. First, as Bennett (2013, p. 12) asks, what are
we to make of culture once its particular universal and its relationship to nature
(nature/culture binary) is challenged as an organising principle? Along these lines I argue that
breaking down nature/culture binaries in the context of environmental conflicts has led to the
emergence of new binaries – traditional/modern and local/global. Secondly, the language of
cultural diversity in sustainable development discourse begs the question as to whether
concepts of cultural diversity were modelled on a biodiversity discourse. And thirdly, the
proposition of cultural diversity as a universal value can undermine the very notion of
diversity.
Cultural Diversity: The Emergence of a Universal Value
Within the period leading up to the turn of the millennium a throng of issues came to the table
as interrelated, providing the conditions for the integrated concept of sustainability to
emerge: an integrated solution to interrelated matters. In the context of an increased global
reach of technology, trade and media, came a growing concern over the detrimental force of
globalisation. Already debates on the relationship between international trade and cultural
protection had been underway since the end of WWI (Burri 2010, p. 1061). In the 1990s
UNESCO began to take an active role in protecting cultural diversity from the negative
effects of economic globalisation (Burri 2010, p.1063). By the early 2000s the idea of
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