Culture for a sustainable development: from theory to evidence

The analysis of the role of culture on sustainable development is a multifaceted problem that does not provide simple interpretative road. For UNESCO «there are four dimensions to sustainable development - society, environment, culture and economy - which are intertwined, not separate» and the Culture 2030 Indicators, recently proposed, serve «to build a coherent and strong narrative on culture and development that is evidence-based» but, above all, they serve to strengthen «the transversal visibility of culture in the 2030 Agenda». Some researchers have stressed the need to directly include culture among the GOALS of sustainability, but their proposal was only partially accepted. To start to fill this gap, highlighting the direct impacts of culture on sustainability and well-being, we propose a multivariate analysis based on a subset of cultural and sustainable indicators available for euro-area countries in 2019. Preliminary results support the evidence of a positive impact of culture across countries, that might mitigate the social and economic dissimilarities.