Culture is also how we live.

• Position: World Decade for Cultural Development, 1988-1997

In a market in Ambato, a town south of Quito, Ecuador, two Indian women haggle about the price of food. They engage in a subtle and complex dance of words, gestures and inflections from which only one will emerge as the winner.

A generation or two ago, only anthropologists would have recognized the women's encounter as an expression of culture. Today it is widely accepted that culture is not only intellectual and artistic creativity but also the way people live-how they eat, dress, mate, work; how they see themselves, their own societies and the outside world.

This wider view of culture was endorsed by the 1982 World Conference on Cultural Policies organized in Mexico City by UNESCO-the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Its implications for development are crucial: any development effort that ignores the culture of the target population is courting disaster. Culture-in other words, the human factor, in all its complexity-must be at the heart of economic and technological development. This is not only a moral but an eminently practical imperative: culture-blind development never lasts; in the view of experts, it does not even take off.

To ensure that from now on the cultural dimension is taken into consideration in development efforts, the United Nations has launched the World Decade for Cultural Development, 1988-1997. Why a cultural Decade?

Linking culture with development is the main objective of the Decade. It is an exciting, monumental task. New forms of development will have to be invented. Old forms will have to be studied to find out how they failed or succeeded in handling the human factor. The pay-off? No less than a radically new way of seeing and practising development by the end of the century.

The Decade will open up the vast, unknown territory connecting economic growth with human happiness. And it will start mapping its elusive topography.

Affirming cultural identity is the second objective. This means finding ways to keep alive what is unique in each society without sealing it off from outside influences. In other words, countering with creative diversity the standardization of taste and life-styles now under way worldwide.

The two other Decade objectives refer to culture in a more restricted, traditional sense: opening cultural life to all, particularly women and young people, and promoting international cultural...