Katarzyna Anna Nawrot

Poland
 

Polish Academy of Sciences

 

Attempts to explain patterns of developmental processes have been undertaken since the beginning of social sciences of modern time. They arise from the fundamental question of why some regions are growing faster, while others are slower or do not develop at all. It also seems important to explain why individual regions or countries have stopped or even stepped back in certain moments of their history. The complexity of the issues being addressed, and at the same time the difficulty of identifying the determinants of development in particular parts of the world, results from the fact that many factors of both quantitative and qualitative nature influence the processes. While the operationalization of developmental processes – from quantitative perspective – does not seem to pose insurmountable difficulties, the recognition of the impact of qualitative components on development becomes extremely complex. Consistently, the analysis of the qualitative components of the developmental processes is not often undertaken by researchers, and thus insufficiently presented in the literature. One of such qualitative aspects is culture and the cultural system and its impact on development.

 

Despite the complexity of above mentioned issues and the clear difficulties in defining culture and cultural system, not to mentioned the relationship between diverse cultural systems and trajectories of development, the author of this work attempts to explore the relationship between sustainable development and the cultural system. First part of the paper – based on so far scientific achievements – advances the concept of cultural system while presenting its own origin of the concept and definition of the cultural system. In the second part of the work, based on the in-depth literature overview, original classification of the literature regarding cultural systems was proposed and an attempt have been made to position the cultural system research in development economics theory. The article ends with an analytical background of cultural system, its identified segments and determinants, and sustainable development followed by conceptual framework for further research regarding high-quality sustainable development in Tibet from the perspective of the cultural dimension and culture system in particular.