Claire Edwina Smith

The Sustainable Development Goals came into effect in January 2016. Up to now, the focus of sustainable development has been on the environment, especially environmental degradation. However, culture heritage could play a major role in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. This workshop will address the challenges highlighted by UNESCO (2015): 1) To identify the measures needed to promote the safeguarding of the cultural heritage in the global development agenda; and 2) To identify the concrete actions that need to be taken in order to integrate cultural heritage conservation and promotion into the sustainable development debate. This workshop will bring together an international panel of experts with local stake-holders in Cancun, Mexico, to develop a list of recommendations and craft a new model for using cultural heritage to drive sustainable development. A special facet of this model is that it will be informed by public forum discussions that test the robustness of the emerging model, increase its intellectual richness, and enhance the likelihood that the model will have practical applicability. In addition, the workshop will produce a professional publication on this topic. Given global, expert participation in the workshop, we anticipate that the model will have globally applicability.