In 2025, Barcelona will be the headquarters of the third Mondiacult, the decisive World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development, the great global meeting of UNESCO that was born in 1982 and seeks to place culture at the center of the global development agenda. In its second edition in 2022, it brought together 2,600 participants and 135 Ministers of Culture from around the world in Mexico and declared culture as a global public good. Miquel Iceta presented the candidacy for the third Mondiacult as Minister of Culture last October and today, with Ernest Urtasun at the head of the ministry and with Iceta himself converted into Spanish ambassador to UNESCO, the general director of this institution, the French Audrey Azoulay, announced after a meeting with Pedro Sánchez and Urtasun at La Moncloa that Barcelona is the chosen city.
For Urtasun, which has announced that the meeting will be held in the second half of 2025, "it will be a unique opportunity to put Spain in a leadership position in the matter of putting culture at the center of the great global challenges." "We are going to talk about cultural rights, heritage, museums, how to defend culture as a global public good and we are also going to debate the culture of peace at a time when conflicts are multiplying throughout the world," he remarked. the minister
Mondiacult, founded in 1982, is the largest international meeting dedicated to culture and the one in Barcelona will be its third edition. The second was held in September 2022 and marked a new milestone for the consideration of culture as a global public good. In the three days that it lasted, 150 States, after ten months of multilateral meetings, unanimously adopted a declaration that for the first time agreed that "culture is a global public good" and asked that it be included as a "specific objective in its own right" among the upcoming United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The text defined a series of cultural rights that must be taken into account in public policies and that ranged from the social and economic rights of artists to artistic freedom, the right of indigenous communities to safeguard and transmit their ancestral knowledge and the protection and promotion of cultural and natural heritage. It also called for the regulation of the digital sector, notably large platforms, for the benefit of cultural diversity on the internet, the intellectual property rights of artists and fair access for all.
The celebration of the conference took place in Mexico 40 years after this global conference was born in that same city in 1982 with a meeting whose results also constituted a historical reference in the evolution of the ideology of culture and its connection with development.
Spain, one of the States with the highest number of declarations and good practices in the sum total of the three Cultural Conventions (1972, 2001 and 2003), presented its candidacy to Mondiacult with a letter in which it assured that it "wishes to continue working to elevate culture to its worldwide recognition as a Global Public Good, also initiating the creation of the World Forum on Cultural Policies and supporting UNESCO in the objective of placing culture in a preeminent place within public policies and cooperation international".
