Why Is Culture a Key for Development?

Latin America represents an acute paradox: it has enormous potential for wealth and at the same time high levels of poverty. The region’s deficits in critical areas such as nutrition, education and health are much higher than they should be given gross domestic product and per capital incomes. The acute inequalities in the region, the highest on the planet, explain part of this paradox. Misguided policies have exacerbated these inequalities during the past decades. Images, values, perceptions and cultural developments play a significant role in favor of either the status quo or reform. By adding the cultural perspective of social capital, this work suggests unconventional questions, challenges the one-dimensional economicism that has dominated the region, and recommends renewed policy proposals. It explains how in the most advanced countries on the planet like Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, cultural values like egalitarianism and the unanimous denunciation of corruption play an important role. Moreover, it indicates how rationalizations of poverty and its causes have skewed reality in Latin America. This work shows how an ethical/cultural value -filial loyalty- is mobilizing the largest flow of capital the region receives, the remittances that poor Latin American immigrants send periodically from developed countries. It also discusses the negative impacts of the high levels of inequality on social capital.

This paper explores various areas in which cultural policies might help the fight against poverty, placing in stark relief and questioning the systemic marginalization of organic cultural activity by orthodox economic outlooks.

The document confronts and debunks the nearly racist underestimation of Latin American culture and shows how its enormous potential has proved valuable in some of the most innovative experiences in the world, including the participatory municipal budget in Porto Alegre. It opens an agenda for widely reintegrating culture into the fight to awaken in Latin America a model of integrated development to end the current unacceptable levels of poverty and inequality. Finally, it vindicates culture as an end in itself, as a signal of the humanity of evolved societies.