Culture, Heritage and Sustainable Development: Deliberation as a Driver of Social Transformation

Abstract

This paper investigates how culture and cultural heritage contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by transforming democratic and social practices. Moving beyond metric-based evaluations and collections of best practices, it proposes a deliberative-agonistic framework for analyzing the transformative role of culture and heritage. Drawing on Marit Hammond’s notion of deliberative democracy, culture is understood as a driver of political meaning-making and social transformation, while deliberation provides the conditions for redefining collective values. Against this background, the paper examines the theoretical foundations of the Faro Convention (2005), which introduced a “people-centered” paradigm linking heritage to social and environmental sustainability. It analyzes the interplay between deliberative and agonistic approaches in heritage governance, showing how conflicts over memory and identity can be transformed into productive democratic dialogue. The Charlottesville case (2017) exemplifies the tension between antagonistic, agonistic, and deliberative framings of contested heritage. At the macro level, comparative analysis of European heritage policies reveals that the capacity to integrate heritage into sustainability strategies strongly correlates with the quality of deliberation, as demonstrated by survey data and V-Dem indices. Deliberative contexts tend to enhance innovation, cohesion, and institutional trust, while agonistic approaches allow plural interpretations of heritage to coexist. The paper concludes that culture’s transformative contribution cannot be fully captured by existing SDG indicators. An integrative evaluation framework is needed—one aligned with SDG 16.7, which promotes responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making as a precondition for sustainable social transformation