The papers in this volume were presented at a UNESCO conference ‘Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific’ in Suva, Fiji, between 9–12 July, 1997. The conference was conceived as part of the Vaka Moana program, the UNESCO Pacific states’ contribution to the United Nations sponsored ‘World Decade for Cultural Development 1988–97’. It was financed by a UNESCO program grant to the New Zealand National Commission.

The conference had two main aims. The first, more general aim, was to explore the ways in which the two politically charged notions of culture and development are commonly conceived, talked about and argued in the region. Eighteen invited speakers addressed this broad theme, focusing on topics of their own choosing. Their papers make up the bulk of the volume. The second aim was to relate the issues raised in these papers to the Vaka Moana program and to the 1995 report of the World Commission on Culture and Development. Two of the papers presented here are concerned directly with the Vaka Moana. The two themes are brought together in three ‘agreed-upon suggestions’. These are summarised in the Introduction.

Although UNESCO is known for its long-standing involvement with culture, it has not, at least until recently, been closely identified with development. The involvement came about through the UN sponsored ‘World Decade for Cultural Development 1988–97,’ which was founded in the context of the widespread critiques of development appearing since the early 1970s. Many projects had failed to achieve the broad goals of human betterment that were expected to be the outcome of international cooperation for material and technological advances throughout the developing countries of the world. The gap between rich and poor nations was not being significantly and uniformly closed, and within many of the developing countries themselves, projects were leading to political unrest and increasing misery of large numbers of people.

The World Decade for Cultural Development was an attempt to address these issues by shifting the emphasis within development paradigms from economic goals to cultural ones. As Perez de Cuellar, then Secretary General of the United Nations stated in launching the Decade in 1988, developments were failing ‘because the importance of the human factor—that complex web of relationships and beliefs, values and motivations that lie at the very heart of a culture—had been underestimated in many development projects.’ The responsibility for implementing the ideas of the World Decade and for bringing about this change of emphasis was then passed over to UNESCO.

In 1993 these issues were further addressed through another joint UNESCO/UN initiative—the World Commission on Culture and Development (chaired by Perez de Cuellar, by then no longer Secretary General)—which brought together a body of people ‘eminent in diverse disciplines’ to prepare a ‘World Report’ containing ‘proposals for both urgent and long-term action to meet cultural needs in the context of development’. Although the notion of 'meeting cultural needs in the context of development' slides around the central contradiction, the Commission, according to its final report, did pay attention to the relationship between culture and development by considering problems such as the following: What are the cultural and socio-cultural factors that affect development? What is the cultural impact of social and economic development? How are cultures and models of development related to one another? How can valuable elements of a traditional culture be combined with modernisation? What are the cultural dimensions of individual and collective well-being?

The Commission’s report was published in 1995 as Our Creative Diversity: Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development. Although it was hoped that it might achieve for culture and development what the Brundtland Report and the Rio Summit had done for environment and development, this does not appear to have happened.

The Vaka Moana program was the Pacific’s reponse to UNESCO’s World Decade. Conceived in 1991, it sought, among other things, to initiate projects that would demonstrate the importance and the practicality of ‘taking account of the cultural dimension’ in development. As one of the main themes of the World Decade, this was seen as particularly appropriate to Pacific countries, with their arrays of traditional institutions and cohesive local economic, social and value systems, many of which were seen to conflict with conventional strategies of economic development. Other related aims have been added as the Vaka Moana has evolved: the study and preservation of traditional bodies of knowledge about local environments; the reinforcement of traditional links and awareness of the common maritime heritage of Pacific peoples; and a host of other projects accommodated to what the governments of the region have seen as more obviously ‘cultural’ in nature, centred on archives, museums, crafts, oral history and traditions and cultural centres. The considerable accomplishments (and difficulties, mainly financial and bureaucratic) of Vaka Moana were canvassed during the course of the Suva meeting, and are fully described by Mali Voi in his paper in this volume.

The Suva meeting was happily unencumbered by such financial and bureaucratic constraints. Nor was it driven by the policy orientation that pervaded the work of the World Commission on Cultural Development. The immediate aim of the meeting was to address the conceptual issues involved in the relationship between culture and development, as these two protean terms are commonly understood and used in the Pacific region. Its second aim, as Russell Marshall expressed it in his conference paper, was ‘to develop some philosophical basis from which we…[might] develop a more coherent strategy for UNESCO’s cultural activities in the Pacific.’ As convener, I was constrained only by these general goals and two suggestions from the office of the World Decade for Cultural Development in Paris: that not all the contributors should be anthropologists and that we should pay attention to the development (as I took it, the commercial exploitation) of natural resources. The invitations sent out to speakers reminded them of UNESCO’s involvement with culture in both its humanistic and anthropological senses, and of the focus of the Vaka Moana program on ‘the necessity of taking account of the cultural dimension’ in development. No other particular meanings of either culture or development were mentioned and speakers were free to choose their own interpretations as well as the topics they applied them to in their prepared papers.

In particular, no mention was made of the World Commission’s 1995 report, Our Cultural Diversity, or of that body’s strong paradigm proclaiming what it saw as the essential meanings of the words and the ways they should (in an ideal world) be related to one another and applied to the goals of peace and the betterment of human kind. Since the conference was sponsored by UNESCO, this may appear to have been either an oversight or a deliberate affront. That was not the case. The aim was to explore the discourse of culture and development in the Pacific, not to relate the World Commission’s recommendations and policies to the region.