As debates intensify over establishing culture as a standalone Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) beyond 2030, this paper studies the policy implications of such a shift and its consequences for the future of global development frameworks. While acknowledging growing calls for a standalone cultural SDG—often framed as SDG18—this study cautions that isolating culture as a separate goal risks reinforcing sectoral silos and undermining its crosscutting relevance in sustainable development. Instead, the paper argues that cultural sustainability is more effectively advanced through systematic mainstreaming across the existing SDGs, ensuring balanced integration alongside economic, environmental, and social dimensions. Using qualitative and quantitative content analysis supported by NVivo, the research examines how culture is represented in SDG implementation reports, policy briefs, and Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs). The findings reveal persistent patterns of marginalization, thematic narrowness, and regional inconsistency in the treatment of culture, indicating structural limitations in SDG implementation rather than a lack of cultural relevance. This reinforces the fact that culture needs to be more visible within the SDG framework; however, the question remains: how? By comparing the two dominant policy trajectories—advocacy for a standalone cultural SDG and the mainstreaming of culture across the existing SDGs—this paper identifies pathways and a set of policy-oriented recommendations to strengthen cultural integration without further fragmenting the sustainability agenda.
Faouri et al. (Mon,) studied this question.