The Stockholm Conference

Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Developement

The power of Culture
UNESCO’s main goal in designing the Stockholm Conference was to transform the new ideas contained in Our Creative Diversity into policy and practice. The Conference was deliberately designed to allow government officials and cultural leaders, artists, intellectuals, scholars, and media personalities, to interact and debate on a range of key issues. Some 2,500 participants, from 149 countries explored practical ways of recasting cultural policies within a human development framework. The outcome was the Action Plan the Conference adopted on 2 April 1998.

The purpose of this Conference was twofold:

• to contribute to the integration of cultural policies in human development strategies at international and national level, and
• to help strengthen UNESCO's contributions to cultural policy formulation and international cultural co-operation

Conference Structure

The conference was organized in three types of sessions : Plenary, Forum and Agora. For the Plenary sessions, Ministers and senior officials were asked to focus their remarks on the proposals contained in the Draft Action Plan, a revised version of which was intended to be the principal outcome of the conference. Eminent Guest Speakers were invited to speak to enrich the Plenary debate.

The Forum sessions, each organized and chaired by a different Member State, were designed as structured discussions on the ten conference themes, each to be opened by a panel discussion between eminent specialists.

The Agora sessions were conceived as a varied "menu" of independent workshops and seminars organized by intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, associations, foundations, etc. with a view to highlighting ideas and new initiatives across a broad spectrum of cultural policy-related areas.

Several other events also took place. The organization of a Business Forum was entrusted to the Progressio Foundation based in The Netherlands, while the UNESCO Secretariat organized a Youth Forum. The International Federation of Actors took the initiative of organizing a conference entitled "Performance Priorities for Cultural Policy Making" and the Swedish Joint Committee for Literary and Artistic Professionals held a conference entitled "Towards a Cultural Agenda 21".

Conference Themes

The two main themes which serve as the basic framework for the Conference were :
1) the challenges of cultural diversity (Background document)
2) the challenges of recasting cultural policies. (Background document)