Stanford Graduate School of Business
The Stanford Initiative on Business and Environmental Sustainability Research Conference Series is hosted by Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Culture and cultural heritage imbue and enrich our lives. As a global community, we are increasingly cognizant of the need to valorize, protect, manage, and sustainably utilize culture to safeguard local communities. This is evidenced through explicit mandates establishing a Cultural Working Group by the G20 nations, and the implicit place of culture in all 17 SDGs, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework 30x30 target, and the UN Ocean Decade.
This workshop has the dual role of providing a broad overview of cultural attributes, including tangible, intangible, and biocultural heritage, while focusing on a specific case region, the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. The event forms the first ‘Chaggosian Cultural Working Group’ (CCWG) meeting. The CCWG was established to provide the infrastructure to undertake research on the cultural dimensions of the Chagos Archipelago, to integrate that research within a new Marine Protected Area policy, while supporting the objective of repatriation for those Chagossians wishing to return to Chagos.
As part of this conference, methods and approaches will be outlined for data gathering, alongside conceptual discussions on how to safeguard the rich cultural heritage of the Chagos Archipelago for Chagossian and global communities.
