Selling Ice-cream to Eskimos: Can Communities Sustain without Sustainable Development Goals?

Since 1970’s the sustainable development has been an important subject for UNESCO. Several expert meetings and gatherings organized and declarations and reports written. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, which foresees a paradigmatic shift in development strategies, has come onto the agenda of many different institutions. Although the concept of culture is weak within the development texts, for the first time, cultural studies have also been taken onto this agenda as the subject of interest. Therefore, it is significant to evaluate all actors in a manner interrelated with each other and to identify the gaps in the big picture with this holistic approach. However, after the establishing of the post-2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development, various sectors of UNESCO begun to deal with the issue in concerning with community participation, environmental sustainability, inclusive social cohesion and economic aspects of sustainable development. Especially for the 2003 Convention (Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage), sustainable development became essential. Among other interrelated aspects of sustainable development, environmental sustainability is the core of intangible cultural heritage. As it is stress in reports of UNESCO-ICH, environmental sustainability requires ensuring a stable climate, sustainably managing natural resources and protecting biodiversity. These in turn depend on improved scientific understanding and knowledge sharing about climate change, natural hazards, the space environment and natural resource limits. Strengthening resilience among vulnerable populations in the face of climate change and natural disasters is essential to limiting their human, social and economic costs. The abovementioned lines show us how environmental sustainability is important for intangible cultural heritage studies. We know that traditional knowledge, values and practices accumulated and renewed across generations as part of intangible cultural heritage have guided human societies in their interactions with the surrounding natural environment for millennia. As it is put forwarded in many researches today, the contribution of intangible cultural heritage to environmental sustainability is recognized in many fields such as biodiversity conservation, sustainable natural resource management and natural disaster preparedness and response. However, it is not always possible to align local knowledge with those set out in theory. Often local practices remain in the shadow of fancy theories especially concerning with the local traditional knowledge. In this context we will discuss modern theories of environmental sustainability, together with the problems arise in local practices. We will try to reveal contradictions between modern sustainable development discourses and local traditional knowledge with examples from the intangible cultural heritage lists. Key words: intangible cultural heritage, 2030 sustainable development goals, environmental sustainability, UNESCO