Culture Based Development (CBD) is a novel research paradigm that offers a systematic approach to studying cultural bias in economic choice. It has been widely published in over 50 academic publications and a book about the founding principles of CBD is forthcoming next year. The essence of CBD is that it offers a synchronized theoretical and empirical approach to capturing and revealing the impact of culture on human choices and behavior. In specific, CBD approaches culture as an amalgam of local attitudes, which can be quantified in two different aggregate types of culture: living culture and cultural heritage.
Living culture is the modern propensity to consume currently generated ideas and attitudes. Cultural heritage is the propensity to relate to traditional inherited attitudes from past periods, embodied in inherited objects shown in museums etc. According to CBD, the local living culture and cultural heritage are the source of an individual’s cultural capital. The exposure of the individual to this cultural capital shapes the individual’s order of preferences.
Preferences for social interactions are derived from this initial order of preferences that an individual has shaped. Hence, by the logical chain sequence, local culture shapes the local social capital. Next, cultural capital and social capital jointly determine the behavior and interaction in the socio-economic system. Put differently, depending on the modern art and the inherited culture that people consume, they shape their views about the world, and this determines how much they will care for other people in the society and for the ecology in particular.
Circular Economy is the aware behaviour of the individuals and firms in a locality, that leads to a more sparing use of the ecological resources of the locality. Therefore, our study undertakes to trace the dependence of the circular economy on the choices that people in the locality make as consumers and producers and firm owners. In all these cases, people’s choices, according to CBD, are underpinned by the local cultural capital and the engagement of the local individuals with local living culture and cultural heritage.
The logical dependence between entities here can be described as follows: local culture shapes individual’s feeling for responsibility towards the local ecology, which determines whether their behavior will be reckless or sparing on the economy, which in its turn results into the better or worse implementation of the circular economy as a phenomenon.
The hypothesis that we entailed to test in our study was concerned with cross checking whether local cultural consumption/exposure of the individuals indeed contributes to explaining their behavior towards the ecology. We tested the hypothesis by using two examples of behavior that can have consequences for the ecology. Namely, we used car driving (approximated with air pollution) and intensive economic productivity (approximated with the level of local gross value added GVA). In other words, we checked whether higher exposure to modern art and historical monuments explains the difference in the behavioral concern for the ecology, expressed in less car driving and less ecology-burdening firm productivity.
To test our hypothesis, we used data from India. We combined various sources to be able to inform all elements of our hypothesis and test the dependence of interest. Namely, we used pro-ecological behavior and other individual characteristics using the World Value Survey wave 2014. We combined this data with data from the Survey on Literacy and Culture in India 2014, which provided us with information about the local exposure to living culture and cultural heritage. We did this because we wanted to demonstrate that the cultural industry is the main source of exposure to cultural capital and the source for the formation of attitudes in an individual.
Our findings reveal that richer places are more reckless in their use of the ecological endowments of places. However, local cultural capital can serve as a buffer that reduces the propensity of local people to abusively exploit the ecology. Thus, the consumption of modern art can be used as a channel to promote a successful circular economy in the real world.
