Social and Cultural Sustainability: Criteria, Indicators, Verifier Variables for Measurement and Maps for Visualization to Support Planning

In this first step we review and interpret social and cultural sustainability criteria. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (Merriam Webster 2012) the term social relates to “human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society”. Social sustainability was originally introduced as a part of the SD concept in the Brundtland report (WCED 1987). The main definition of SD, namely “development which meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability for future generations to meet their own needs” has a clear social imperative. The Brundtland report focused on issues like health, and the income gap between rich and poor with an aim to reduce poverty globally. The Rio conference in 1992 introduced social sustainability as the right to live a decent life; inter-generational, intra-generational, and international social justice; and local participation in SD processes. This was further elaborated by including issues like welfare, safety and a healthy environment, access to education, opportunities to learn, identity, sense of place, and public participation. The concept of social sustainability continues to develop. Thin (2002) describes social justice, solidarity, participation, and security as social values. Social values can be characterized as conditions associated with quality of life in the landscape, including such things as equity, participation in democratic life, security and health (Rosenström et al. 2006). Recent additions include concepts like human well-being, happiness, and quality of life (Colantonio 2007; Table 1). For a more comprehensive review of social sustainability, see Murphy (2012).

There are many definitions of culture (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952). To select one, culture could be described as: (1) the mind of a cultured person; (2) the process of culturing people; (3) art and intellectual works that might culture a person; and (4) culture as a system that maintains, communicates, and reproduce the characteristics of a society, and that allows for people to participate in it (Williams 1981). Cultural sustainability was first mentioned in 1995, when the World Commission on Culture and Development (WCCD), building on the SD discourse, defined cultural sustainability as inter- and intra-generational access to cultural resources (WCCD 1995). Cultural heritage is defined as “the entire corpus of material signs - either artistic or symbolic - handed on by the past to each culture and, therefore, to the whole of humankind” (UNESCO 1989). Tangible parts include monuments of architectural, sculptural, painted, and archeological nature and human-made landscapes (UNESCO 1972). While intangible cultural heritage include “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.” (UNESCO 2003). In 2001 a process with the aim to add culture as the fourth sustainability dimension started with the UNESCO Universal Declaration on cultural diversity (UNESCO 2001), which is also argued for by scholars (e.g., Saastamoinen 2005). This argumentation has continued with the Rio+20 process (UN 2012). The cultural working group under the Rio+20 process describes the present situation as “Today human beings have the capacities but do not have some of the capabilities (tools and skills) to understand the world and to transform it so that it becomes really sustainable”. Capabilities such as literacy, creativity, critical knowledge, sense of place, empathy, trust, risk, respect, recognition, to list a few, could then be understood as cultural components of sustainability (Culture 21 2011).

For both social and cultural sustainability there is an ongoing development from a more traditional view that focuses on material cultural heritage and basic social needs to a view including also immaterial aspects (Table 1). These encompass both tangible and intangible values.

To illustrate the second step we identified four social and four cultural indicators based on our review of scholarly work, international policies, and six natural resource use sectors’ policies (Table 2). The review and the expert interviews related to individual natural resource sectors showed that these policies rarely considered more than one or two of the indicators. In addition, considerations directed towards these were rarely well developed and supported by scholarly work (Table 2). There were no traces of other social or cultural indicators in sector policy or practice. This is surprising given that the importance of integrating social and cultural values in landscape planning is widely recognized at the international policy level.

While measurements of social and cultural landscape values presents methodological challenges (Scazzosi 2004; Tress et al. 2006; Naveh 2007), a set of concepts with accompanying measurements can be discerned which are being used by scholars and policy makers to identify both social and cultural values at a landscape level. Following the comprehensive review by Magis and Shinn (2009), we interpret social values as four groups of indicators:

Applied research on cultural values is most often associated with cultural heritage objects and cultural landscapes, described as the “bearers of the place identity, or genius loci” (Dramstad et al. 2001; Aluame et al. 2003). While culture heritage objects have been identified for centuries, the cultural landscape is a more recent concept, based on the desire to treat the “entire landscape as an artefact” (Sauer 1925; Scazzosi 2004). The identification and evaluation of cultural landscapes is inherently more complex than of cultural heritage objects. As criteria to describe cultural landscapes, Antrop (2003) proposed historical significance (coherence, information from the past), esthetic qualities (naturalness, authenticity, stewardship), and utility (accessibility, monetary value). Similarly, there are other cultural values on the landscape that derive their value from contemporary uses such as recreation activities (UK Forestry Commission 2002; Sheppard et al. 2005) and self-provisioning activities, such as the harvesting of fish, berries, wild mushrooms, and wildlife (Crone and Haynes 2001). Finally, it is also possible to characterize cultural values as a type of ‘capital’ present on a given territory. Bourdieu (1986) described cultural capital as present in three forms: (1) the embodied state, i.e., as long-lasting dispositions of the human mind and body; (2) the objectified state, i.e., as any kind of cultural goods, such as pictures, books, instruments, machines; and (3) other human built objects such as buildings and structures, the institutionalized state or academic and educational qualifications. The subsequent use of the term is somewhat confusing since scholars often select one of the three forms and use it as if it represents the whole concept (Kraaykamp and van Eijck 2010). By contrast, Bourdieu (1986) defined social capital as social obligations or connections. Similarly, Putnam (2000) described social capital as the social networks and norms that enable collective action, emphasizing the importance of social capital for the creation of a vibrant democratic system. Inventorying and mapping the cultural policy environment (presence of cultural institutions, level of participation in cultural life, etc.) is one way to illustrate this dimension of social capital. Hence, social capital is a cultural property of a human community. Mercer (2002) describes four categories which can be used to monitor the success of cultural policies for human development. These are: (a) cultural vitality, diversity, and conviviality; (b) cultural access, participation, and consumption; (c) culture, lifestyle, and identity; and (d) culture, ethics, governance, and conduct. The society of Swedish regional heritage officers identified 16 indicators for cultural values, emphasized three and pointed out one, the number of active farms as the most important (Föreningen Sveriges Länsantikvarier 2004). We selected (1) cultural vitality, diversity, and conviviality or social capital; (2) cultural landscape; (3) cultural heritage; and (4) cultural access, participation, and consumption as cultural indicators (Table 2).

To conclude, while the term social relates to the individual, family, or individuals in a society, the term cultural relates to higher societal levels, i.e., properties of groups of people, communities, and regions or systems (White 1975). This means that “cultural” relates to a non-biological system of development and adaptation (Steward 1955). Culture thus includes any kind of heritage from the past, ranging from how people interact and do things to any kind of object, or environments that are a results of human constructions or use of the landscape. Recognizing that social and cultural criteria to some extent overlap, we nevertheless identified two groups of indicators for further analysis and to demonstrate this approach.

The third step in our approach was to match the indicators with available data as verifier variables (Table 3). Data available at a municipal level that best matched the indicators were used. Indicators for human development and gender equity were based on the Human Development and Gender Development Indexes (HDI and GDI) (UNDP 2007). To use these indexes for all Swedish municipalities we simplified them by using variables for health, i.e., life expectancy at birth (FHI 2011), average income (Statistics Sweden 2010), higher education among people 25–64 years old (Statistics Sweden 2011b) and followed the careful instruction in UNDP (2007). While the HDI presents a measure of human development, the GDI compares the situation for men and women. To avoid confusion with the Human Development and Gender Development Indexes we named these verifier variables Index of Human Development (IHD) and Index of Gender Development (IGD).

The fourth step was to visualize the verifier variables as maps. There was a general divide in the spatial variation of verifier variables for social (Fig. 1) and cultural (Fig. 2) sustainability between northwest and south Sweden as well as between urban and rural regions. However, for participation in local elections there was no clear pattern. Rural region municipalities in general had a higher percentage of urban forest than urban regions. IHD and IGD scored higher for some municipalities with large cities and universities while social capital was higher in the north and especially the northwest. The number of active farms per km² was higher in the south, below the ecological boundary separating the temperate deciduous and the boreal forest eco-regions in Sweden. Historical remains had a similar pattern except for the municipality of Falun in the Bergslagen region, that hosts a large historical mining site (Angelstam et al. 2013b) and many related historical remains. Also the verifier variable available art was higher in the south, included some municipalities with high values along the northern east coast and some scattered municipalities with fairly high values in mid-Sweden.

Of the chosen social and cultural verifier variables IHD and IGD were highly correlated (Table 4). This suggests that of these two social indicators one was redundant in the present data set. It should be stressed that among the cultural indicators “Voluntary groups per 1000 inhabitants” was negatively correlated to other cultural indicators, indicating another direction of the overall gradients. Top-ranked municipalities for this indicator were mainly small municipalities in the inland of northern Sweden, whereas cultural landscape (as number of active farmers/km²), heritage (as historical remains/km²), and access (as number of available cinemas showrooms, theaters, museums, and libraries/municipality) had the highest ranks for southern and densely populated areas.

The proportion of the population with a higher education, and the average income, were important factors for computing IHD and IGD. In fact, these two factors were highly correlated with all social indicators, whereas climate (average air temperature) was not (Table 5). As for cultural indicators, climate (average air temperature) was an important factor with a high correlation to especially “Active farms per km²” and “Historical remains per km²”. Also population density was generally highly correlated to cultural indicators. To conclude, important drivers that were correlated to social indicators were income and education, and for cultural indicators climate and population density.