“It should be obvious, but it is still a battle. But it’s a battle we will fight together, in a documented way,” stated Audrey Azoulay at the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development, MONDIACULT 2025, which concluded today in Barcelona, Spain.
The Secretary-General of UNESCO, the United Nations agency for education and culture, commended the efforts of the conference, which brought together 120 ministers from around the world and delegations from 163 countries, as well as hundreds of governmental and non-governmental organizations.
At MONDIACULT 2015, UNESCO presented its first world report on cultural policies and sustainable development. Today, the conference’s ministerial plenary unanimously adopted a document where 120 ministers reaffirm culture as a “global public good” and as a driver and facilitator of economic development and multilateralism.
The 120 ministers also call for culture to have its own objective in the next UN sustainable development framework, which is not currently the case in the Agenda 2030. They have outlined priority areas of work to achieve this aspiration, including the recognition of cultural rights as human rights, responses to crises, the impact of climate change, the preservation of cultural diversity, and the protection of the rights and conditions of artists and creators, among others.
The UNESCO Secretary-General stated that the document, titled “Commitment of the Ministers and Ministers of Culture MONDIACULT 2025,” clearly sets out a direction and goals for cultural policies in the coming years, reaffirming culture also as a “form of resistance.”
“In a world where reasons for losing hope are accumulating, where wars persist unresolved, where the planet is impoverished by climate change, where technology changes everything, you came here to create collective work, to say that we can still be together and that consensus is still possible. And today, perhaps only culture allows for this,” said Audrey Azoulay.
“[Culture] is not an adornment of the present, but the backbone of our societies,” stated the Spanish government’s Minister of Culture, the host and co-organizer of the conference.
Ernest Urtasun emphasized that culture “is not a secondary good,” but “a strategic pillar of global governance” and must therefore be preserved, supported, and be at the center of multilateralism, being essential for global peace and prosperity.
This year’s edition of MONDIACULT was the third in history, following conferences in 1982 and 2022 in Mexico.
UNESCO and the UN agency’s member states agreed in 2022 that MONDIACULT would be held every four years from 2025 onwards, and it was announced this week in Barcelona that another conference will take place in 2029 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The Minister of Culture, Youth, and Sports, Margarida Balseiro Lopes, led the Portuguese delegation at MONDIACULT 2025.
