Master’s Thesis How Does Culture Connect and Contribute to the Sustainable Development? - A Literature Review by WU Chaoqun 51218635 August 2020 Master’s Thesis Presented to Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of International Cooperation Policy i Certification Page I, Wu Chaoqun (Student ID 51218635) hereby declare that the contents of this Master’s Thesis / Research Report are original and true, and have not been submitted at any other university or educational institution for the award of degree or diploma. All the information derived from other published or unpublished sources has been cited and acknowledged appropriately. Wu Chaoqun 2020/08/21 ii Acknowledgements I would like to give my deep gratitude to all those who helped me with my growth during the master student time. My deepest gratitude goes first to my family, with their support and encouragement, I had had the opportunity to study in Japan. Then, thanks to Yuhan Kuek, my partner, without his company and help, I would not have finished this paper. And this thesis is only one part of study in Japan, Yuhan and I had visited many great places in Japan together, gained a lot of knowledge besides school. Secondly, I would like to thank Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), that this school accepted me and let me study in Beppu city, then helped me to shape my world, by contacting with different people and making friends, giving me a deeper understanding of different cultures. Thirdly, I would like to thank the Professor LI Yan, my supervisor, during the two years’ study, not only in terms of learning, but also life, she taught me a lot. And for her constant and step-by-step guidance, this thesis could move to this form. Next, I would to thank all the teachers who had taught me for these two years that enriched my knowledge, supervised me a lot for my learning. The following, I would like to thank the teacher Takeyoshi Kajiwara, a very kind person who lives in Beppu, helped me a lot in learning Japanese culture, Japanese calligraphy and gave me so much support. Lastly, because my hometown is Wuhan city, and this year, Wuhan had suffered from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the city had accepted the help of people from all over the world, here, I would like to express my gratitude to those kind people. iii I sincerely thank all the doctors and the medical staff around the world, and the people who had contributed to this fight against the COVID‑19 pandemic! Finally, I deeply hope that the COVID‑19 pandemic will pass soon, and everyone can live a healthy and joyful life. iv Table of Contents Certification Page ....................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... iii Summary .................................................................................................................. vii Chapter 1: Introduction ..............................................................................................1 1.1 Research Background ......................................................................................1 1.2 Research significance ...........................................................................................5 1.3 Research questions and objectives ........................................................................6 Chapter 2 Culture .......................................................................................................9 2.1 What is “Culture” .................................................................................................9 2.1.1 Culture in Western and Chinese context .........................................................9 2.1.2 The definition of “Culture” .......................................................................... 12 2.2 The components of culture ................................................................................. 14 2.2.1 The material culture ..................................................................................... 14 2.2.2 The non-material culture .............................................................................. 17 Chapter 3 The progress of culture’s development in sustainable development ...... 26 3.1 The development of culture ................................................................................ 26 3.2. Review on the milestone of culture development in the process of sustainable development ............................................................................................................ 28 3.3 The pillar of sustainable development ................................................................ 32 Chapter 4 Methodology and limitations ................................................................... 33 4.1 Methodology ...................................................................................................... 33 4.2 Limitations ......................................................................................................... 37 v Chapter 5 Analysis for 52 review papers .................................................................. 38 5.1 The study areas and trend of sustainable development ........................................ 38 5.2 Introduction of the literature review for the 52 articles ....................................... 40 5.2.1 Directly about the relationship between culture and sustainable development ............................................................................................................................. 43 5.2.2 The articles refer to the single type of culture or aspects related to culture .... 57 5.2.3 The development of culture in specific circumstances of sustainable development ......................................................................................................... 71 5.2.4 Culture in the title of the article has another indication, meaning planting .... 88 Chapter 6 Findings and Suggestions ........................................................................ 90 6.1. Findings and discussion for 52 articles .............................................................. 90 6.1.1 The relationship between culture and sustainable development .................... 91 6.1.2 The contribution of culture for sustainable development .............................. 94 6.2 Suggestions ........................................................................................................ 96 References .................................................................................................................. 98 vi Summary Today, the world is facing many global crises and challenges. In order to limit negative environmental and social impacts, human being had put forward the concept of sustainable development, set goals and taken actions to advance the process of sustainable development. However, scholars’ research on sustainable development mainly focuses on the three major aspects: economy, society and environment/ecology. Only a few articles talked about culture and sustainable development. In order to further promote the development of human high-quality life and the construction of sustainable development, it must consider the relationship between culture and sustainable development. Therefore, the thesis raises two research questions: 1. What is the connection and contribution of culture to the sustainable development according to the scholars’ research on sustainable development in the past? 2. How can culture contribute to sustainable development? The first part of this thesis introduced the background, significance, and the objectives of the research. Then, the second part defined the concept of “culture” discussed in this research, which referred to all the spiritual activities of mankind and its products. Culture explains the core problems of kinds of issues being produced, sent, communicated, accepted, understood, and mutated to people, and all kinds of cultural forms are the basic methods of providing human communication and studying things. vii These products and activities were divided into two kinds, the material culture and non-material culture. Material culture was an entity that existed, it presented culture in a physical, perceptible and measurable form while non-material culture included symbols, values, cultural norms and people’s way of life, it was abstract and constantly inherited. The third part was to introduce the process of culture development through Sichuan cuisine’s development. Culture itself had the characteristics of development and inheritance, but to achieve the sustainable development of culture, it required planning and strategy. Consequently, the author combed the milestone of culture development in the process of sustainable development, sorting out the characteristics of sustainable development culture, that required sustainable development culture were: people-based, participation-based, systematic, pluralistic, dynamic, integrated, confident and responsible. The third part used two methods to analyze the literature that met the search criteria in Web of Science from 1900 to 2020. The first was Occurrence, resulted in 11463 results, finding that the most studied areas of sustainable development were environmental science, green sustainable science technology and environmental studies, which meant research on culture and sustainable development was a weak subject