The participation of Non-State Actors in the UNESCO Cultural Diversity Convention: Current Status and Proposals for Reform

Abstract

The paper is articulated into four sections. The first section illustrates the CPPDCE’s legal framework for engagement with actors other than States. It shows that this framework expresses a ''functionalist'' emphasis on NSAs’ capacity of contrib-uting to the adoption of higher quality decisions on the part of States and facilitating their implementation. The second section investigates the relationship between NSAs and the Convention’s bodies. It argues that the existing ''functionalist-oriented'' regula-tion not only has prevented basic stakeholders from having access to the Convention’s processes, but has also created imbalances among participants, to the detriment of the Convention’s very ambitions of promoting pluralism and cultural diversity. The third section follows with some recommendations to enhance the Convention’s governance, by making it more inclusive. It is suggested that the ''democratic'' approach may be used to broaden the range of participants and promote a more balanced representation among them, but it is fundamentally flawed in that it does not challenge the privileged position of States in international governance, and consequently upholds a narrow un-derstanding of NSAs’ status therein. Therefore, the paper proposes to include interna-tional human rights law as an additional means of framing NSA participation in the Convention, by looking at such participation as a way of realising the human right to take part in cultural life. The analysis shows that the proposed approach – which from now on is called ''human rights-based approach'' – may prompt an overcoming of the present State centrism of international governance, by converting NSAs’ participation from a concession into a prerogative and, under certain circumstances, by requiring it to take place on an equal footing with that of States. The fourth and final section offers some concluding observations on how to advance a full understanding of the legiti-mate role of NSAs in international governance broadly. It is argued that, while seem-ingly competing, all the three approaches to NSAs’ participation – the ''functionalist'', the ''democratic'' and the ''human rights-based'' – may in practice be variously com-bined to accommodate the different nature of the actors engaging in participation and their expected contribution to international policy-deliberation and decision-making.