Culture and Sustainable Development: the Grounds for Interaction and Contours of Integration

The issue of interrelation between culture, na ture, and sustainable development is getting even more acute at the beginning of the third millennium. The un derestimation of the natural component in culture forma tion and of the increasing influence of culture on nature in its development, entering the unsustainable phase, has become obvious up to this point. Since a socionatural sys tem is a complex human-sized system, any further deve lopment of the system will be under the powerful infl uence of anthropogenic activities. At the same time, there will be an immeasurable increase in the role of culture, which should be considered as a set of values determining the mo tivation of this activity; a combination of knowledge and information that guide people; a policy built on the com petencies relevant to the complexity of the systems and pro cesses that are included in the management. Under this ap proach, the culture becomes a powerful driving force for all those processes. The orientation of sustainable development on people, which requires a new communication system and new ethics, is determined by searching of the mechanisms of unity, con nection, and interaction between countries and cultures. The conception of the “Agenda 21 for Culture”; the under standing of culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable deve lopment, along with economy, ecology, and social parti cipation; the theoretical development of the role of culture in sustainable development, using the multidisciplinary ap proach, require the creation of new practices of the transdis ciplinary and cross-cultural measuring of the role of culture in sustainable development, as well as the active inclusion of domestic research and development in those processes.