No time to waste: culture needs to be in the #SDGSummit Declaration

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The #Culture2030Goal campaign advocates to national governments and on the international stage for the formal inclusion of culture in sustainable development frameworks. As a member of the campaign, IMC joins the other organisations and calls on the UN to recognise culture as a driver of sustainable development during the SDG Summit in September 2023.

2030 is only a few years away and the Zero Draft of the SDG Summit Declaration aims to set out an agenda for boosting work to implement the 2030 Agenda. However, in its drive to identify key accelerators of sustainable development, there is one glaring omission: culture.
Its absence increases the chances of repeating the mistakes of 2015, when culture was not adequately recognised, leading to a situation where, as the UN Secretary General has indicated, ‘culture and respect for cultural diversity, however, remain undervalued and underutilised in the push for SDG progress’.
IMC and other members of the Culture2030Goal campaign have issued a call to amend the Zero Draft for the SDG Summit and recognise the work done at Mondiacult 2022 where the final declaration explicitly affirmed culture as a “global public good” and where the campaign presented a zero draft of a potential development goal focused on culture.
We need everyone's support for building a future where culture is on top of any development agenda. Therefore, we call upon our members worldwide to get in touch and invite culture ministries, UNESCO National Commissions, and Permanent Missions to the United Nations to share this message and urge them not to miss this opportunity. Together, we can all contribute to the integration of culture and pave the way for a more sustainable and culturally inclusive future!
If culture remains absent from sustainable development agendas, IMC’s vision for “a world where everyone can enjoy access to music, where they can learn, experience, create, perform, and express themselves through music, and in which artists of every kind are recognized and fairly remunerated”, will be less likely to become a reality.
Together with your support, IMC and other members of the Culture2030Goal campaign, will continue working together to widen the understanding of culture’s importance to all future sustainable development.

Click HERE to read the call.