Indicators for the world we want

Culture is how you and I engage with the world: it shapes how we see things and how we interact with people. Culture has also created systems and institutions that make us behave in certain ways by favouring some ontologies over others (Srivastava 2026). It is an interface with the world but also with yourself and has different applications pre-installed: storage of collective memories, shortcuts to community processes, a selection of games, language and emotion processing. In short, culture creates relationality (Escobar 2024). But culture needs to update and evolve, just like an operating system, responding to all the changes happening around and within us. Having a multitude of operating systems in the world – or: plural ways of knowing – is not just good but necessary as it enables us to engage with our diverse biomes and bioregions respectively. Naturally, the operating system also needs to interface with other environmental actors as well as emerging cultural techniques and technologies – welcome to the part of the system the international cultural relations module slots into.

If we understand cultural infrastructure as social and cognitive infrastructure (Calafati et al. 2026) and decide not to update our cultural operating system, we and the world will continue to move towards unsustainability. Some might exploit emerging flaws as humanity evolves but culture does not. We might lose touch and encounter bluescreens more often, while our art becomes meaningless and self-referential. An operating system that nurtures creativity, imagination, and diversity is thus one to be better suited to address future challenges. Imagine a variety of open source innovations instead of monopolistic closed system patches.

Whether our poems are odes to the rivers or our songs tell of mountain birds, our everyday practices, our beliefs, and our values are shaped by the natural conditions, the life, and its cycles we encounter on a daily basis. This is but one indicator that human culture is always in relation to nature. We are in a symbiotic relationship: when we lose biodiversity, for example through wilful destruction, late-stage capitalism or climate change, we also lose cultural diversity; and if we destroy cultural diversity, for example through colonialism, materialism or modern culture wars, we also lose touch with parts of biodiversity, accelerating its decline. As stewards of this planet and part of planetary biodiversity, humans and their cultural diversity are therefore essential for planetary survival. This relationship is interdependent and built on reciprocity (Kimmerer 2020). As a response, if nature changes, culture must change, too, as culture is a ritualised group response to what we find around us; or as Keola Lake (in Aluli-Meyer 2006) puts it, “culture is the best practice of a group of people.”

The UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has recently highlighted the important relationship between cultural diversity and biodiversity (United Nations Human Rights Council 2026). So, when the United Nations introduces an indicator on minimum dietary diversity for human health and wellbeing into the Sustainable Development Goals Framework (FAO 2025), we might also want to think about what minimum cultural diversity and biodiversity might look like to enable a sustainable, not further degrading future of our planet.

Art is also exploration, is inquiry, is connection, is worldbuilding, is expression, and is debate. Art is a great many things and then some. (Calafati et al. 2026) But how often do we fully realise this vast potential in programme-based artistic engagement? Whenever we engage with art in the context of ICR, cultural diplomacy or cultural cooperation, there is a chance that institutional logic changes its objectives to influence, power, and hegemonic narratives. While art can be instrumental in achieving sustainable development – and, frankly, it should – we must be aware not to instrumentalise art and use it for embellishment and illustration only, or worse, deliberately deploy art for propaganda and distributing harmful narratives. ICR prioritises people-to-people exchange as opposed to its more state-to-state, state-to-people or institution-to-institution cousins; and yet, agenda setting and programme design usually still sit within institutions, often state-affiliated institutions. The people it seeks to engage are rarely part of the discussion. We currently limit the potential of ICR to fully embrace the potential of arts and culture by not engaging the very artists, cultural practitioners, and communities we want to be part of our activities. Too often do we build institutional programme logics, theories of change, and key performance indicators on top of cultural and artistic processes, the people of which might not even be aware of it. Instead, we should be treating art as the complex, multifaceted and versatile cultural expression it is.

People should tell stories. Not institutions, not corporations, and certainly not large language models or artificial intelligence. Institutions’ dedicated role is not to build and tell stories but to facilitate, harbour, and reinforce the stories of artists and communities, and protect and support these storytellers to do just that. And yes, this also extends to curation as a form of storytelling. If art really is all we said above, we need to take a hard look at those institutions that actively engage in storytelling and to what end. While not necessarily hostile or deliberately pushing a certain narrative, they might still be flattening the diversity and nuance of stories; often unknowingly so following an institutional logic that validates such tendencies. In the case of AI, we are looking at an averaged reinforcement of dominant narratives that can lead to memory engineering, accelerate epistemicide, and desecrate cultural knowledge (Khan 2024).

What we need is multiple, layered, contextual narratives that can help to keep stories and alongside the cultures that birthed them alive in all their glorious diversity and nuance as well as plurality and sometimes incompatibility, ready for current and future generations to engage with, learn from, and build their own stories upon them. And of course we also need the wrappers, the infrastructure, the epistemic diversity to allow the stories and their storytellers to flourish.

A lot of ICR are rooted in former colonial relations, and an addition to or vehicle of modern economic and political relations (Chitty et al. 2022, Budziszewska et al. 2025). Intentions aside, it is this uneven bilateralism that makes ICR institutions prone to falling into the traps of building its own narratives and stripping the people and artists it should seek to connect of their room to navigate their own stories and connections. If de-colonised, ICR would apply different power relations, epistemic plurality, engagement logics, and engagement directions. ICR do not even need to only refer to cultural relations between nation-states. ICR could, for example, manifest in the form of inter-Indigenous relations (Budziszewska et al. 2025), beyond national identifiers and potential hegemonic identity narratives.

What if we were to go one step further and think about de-institutionalisation? If de-institutionalised, or perhaps decentralised away from governmental control, ICR might be less concentrated and less project-based, while institutional production logic could be overwritten with process engagement logic – away from key performance indicators and toward relationship not just as a means but as an end. Of course, there is the argument that strong institutions in a rules-based order keep authoritarian tendencies at bay. Seeing this global order collapse in real time, however, it might be worth asking what if ICR were not following central narratives: engagement might be rich but fragmented, powerful but scattered; we would have lots of small pockets of cultural relations shaped directly by the people without an institutional vector that decides who gets to be part of it, what the rules of engagement are, and what product should emerge at the end of each engagement. This is an argument for ICR as a social practice, as agency and embracing a plurality of how cultures know, think, express, and engage. Perhaps, it would turn into something more like international cultural solidarity rather than diplomacy or cooperation (Vellani in Chitty et al. 2022).

Policy makers are still those that have an outsized power over how ICR are organised and funded. What if we were to approach policy making with a curator’s mindset? The question is no longer simply how to represent others well, but how to transform the conditions under which representation, visibility, and cultural value are produced in the first place. A policy maker with a curatorial mindset engages the work as a genuine method of generating, mediating, and reflecting experience and knowledge. They approach policies not as a site of production of values, but a site of inquiry, focusing less on a fast outcome and more on a slow process. In this case, a policy maker would assume the role of translation, rather than active meaning-making and defining. This means translating the values, hopes and dreams from different stakeholders by not reducing them to a single meaning, but to produce differences. They create conditions in which policies are crafted with and by the communities rather than for the communities. They would bring forth and develop social encounters and circuits, navigate complexity and interdependence of thought, hone in on patterns, filter and synthesise. A policy maker as a curator dismantles hierarchical decision making and creates equitable spaces for inclusive discourse.