Culture and Public Action

Aspects of Culture

The term "culture" has two usages or definitions within the World Bank. The first, wider, definition describes particular shared values, beliefs, knowledge, skills and practices that underpin behavior by members of a social group at a particular point in time (with potentially good and bad effects on processes of poverty reduction). The second definition describes creative expression, skills, traditional knowledge and cultural resources that form part of the lives of people and societies, and can be a basis for social engagement and enterprise development. These include, for example, craft and design, oral and written history and literature, music, drama, dance, visual arts, celebrations, indigenous knowledge of botanical properties and medicinal applications, architectural forms, historic sites, and traditional technologies. 

Book on Culture and Poverty

The World Bank has commissioned a book on culture and poverty, "Culture and Public Action: A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue on Development Policy":

• that identifies key aspects of culture that have been neglected in the development process,
• that sketches a range of actions external agencies can use to address these cultural aspects, and 
• that suggestions how, methodologically, economics and anthropology can together address aspects of culture both fully and rigorously.

The book, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, is scheduled to be published by Stanford University Press in September 2004. In the meantime, you can access all the early drafts of the papers in the book at: http://www.cultureandpublicaction.org/. The website also provides video recordings of the proceedings of a conference held in June 2002.

Research Themes

The research investigates five culture-poverty relationships:

• Cultural Enterprise and Industry Development, & Poverty Reduction: How can poor groups’ opportunities to use and gain sustainable benefits from their traditional knowledge, their skills, talents, creative expression be enhanced? How can support to the conservation and management of culturally significant structures and sites contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable development?
• Voice and Participation: How can an understanding of culture support better processes of participation, giving voice to the poor and making poverty reduction activities more effective? How can participation processes help poor groups to take stock and draw on their values and strengths in setting priorities and decision-making on projects? How can respect for diversity, and a voice in public media, be facilitated?
• Globalizing Forces and Identity: How should the interests of the poor be promoted in the face of globalization, liberalization, marketization, and technological change? Globalization, marketization, and technological change have different impacts on different groups because of their cultural functioning. Economically excluded groups may not have the resources to sustain their identities, due to pressures ranging from migration and dispersion to a dominant media.
• Household Behavior and Poverty Reduction: How can more accurate assumptions regarding cultural behaviors improve public distribution systems? Public distribution systems regularly underperform because some of their assumptions about the relationship between culture in the broadest sense and household behavior are mistaken.
• Intellectual Rights and Poverty Reduction: How can the knowledge and cultural heritage of poor communities be harvested such that they themselves are compensated for their contributions? Intellectual property regimes can threaten to remove local knowledge from indigenous groups, and reward the commercial benefits to intermediary groups.

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