Cultural Diversity · 2005 Convention · Recommendations · Digital environment · UNESCO

Protecting Cultural Diversity in the Digital Age: The 2024 UNESCO Recommendations

11 recommendations. 4 strategic axes. 1 urgent question: in a world shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence, who speaks for the diversity of cultural expressions, and how?

Salim DADA · UNESCO Cultural Expert · May 10, 2026

First meeting of the UNESCO Reflection Group on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in the Digital Environment, Quebec City, May 28-30, 2024.

Context

In June 2023, the Conference of Parties to the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (the foundational international treaty on cultural rights and cultural policy) tasked the UNESCO Secretariat with forming a group of international experts. Their mandate: study the effects of the Digital Environment on Cultural Diversity, and propose concrete solutions. I had the honour of being selected as one of the eighteen experts from across the world who would make up this group.

Over the course of 2024, the group held two intensive working meetings: in Québec City (May 28-30) and in Paris (November 6-8), before finalising eleven recommendations, officially published by UNESCO on December 16, 2024. Those recommendations were then presented to UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee at its 18th session in Paris (February 11-14, 2025), before 161 member states.

This article aims to explain those recommendations in a simplified way, for cultural professionals, policymakers, artists, and anyone who cares about who gets to shape our shared digital cultural future. It also identifies, honestly, where the recommendations fall short and what remains unresolved.

Why This Matters? and Why Now?

The 2005 Convention was adopted at a moment when the internet was still young and streaming platforms barely existed. Twenty years later, the cultural landscape has been transformed beyond recognition. A handful of global technology companies (through their platforms, algorithms, and recommendation engines) now determine what music people hear, what films they watch, what books they read, and what languages they encounter online. Cultural diversity, which the Convention was designed to protect, is increasingly shaped not by human curatorial choices but by commercial algorithmic logic optimised for engagement metrics.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated this dynamic dramatically. AI can now generate music, text, images, and audiovisual content at scale, in seconds, at near-zero cost. The implications for artists, cultural industries, and the communities whose traditions are mined as training data are profound and largely unregulated. The eleven recommendations the group produced are a response to this reality, organised around four strategic axes.

Summary of the 11 recommendations by strategic axis

II. Information Sharing & Good Practices

R2: Build a Global Observatory for Cultural Diversity in the Digital Environment — There is currently no systematic international mechanism for tracking how cultural diversity is evolving online — which languages are growing or disappearing, which local content is discoverable or buried, which national policies are working. This recommendation calls for a comprehensive monitoring system: a shared database that documents national policies, tracks multilingual content across platforms, and provides policymakers and researchers with the data they need to make informed decisions.

R3: Reform the Quadrennial Periodic Reporting Framework — Every four years, member states submit reports on how they are implementing the 2005 Convention. These reports, designed in the pre-digital era, are not equipped to capture the digital dimension of cultural life. The recommendation proposes updating the reporting methodology with new quantitative indicators (local content visibility on platforms, multilingual production rates) and qualitative analysis of AI's impact on creative industries, supported by a centralised digital platform for submission and comparison across countries.

"The question is no longer whether algorithms shape culture — they already do. The question is whether democratic institutions will shape the algorithms."

III. Aawareness-Raising & Advocacy

R4: Create a Permanent International Forum on Digital Culture — Cultural policy and technology governance currently operate in parallel tracks that rarely meet. This recommendation proposes a regular international forum — bringing together policymakers, cultural industry representatives, civil society, and crucially, the major digital platforms and tech companies themselves — to develop shared strategies for protecting cultural diversity in the digital space. A permanent digital platform would maintain dialogue between sessions.

R5: Strengthen Advocacy Coalitions for Cultural Diversity — Individual governments and cultural organisations face an acute power imbalance when negotiating with global technology conglomerates — the GAFAMs, NATUs, and BATXs that dominate the digital cultural landscape. This recommendation calls for building coordinated international cultural coalitions capable of exercising meaningful pressure in digital governance processes, and for empowering civil society organisations to participate actively in AI and digital policy decisions.

R6: Promote Digital Media Literacy and Culturally Responsible Practices — Most users (including artists and cultural professionals) have little understanding of how platform algorithms shape what they see, hear, and discover. This recommendation advocates for comprehensive media and cultural literacy programmes, particularly targeting young people, that develop critical skills for navigating algorithmic environments. It also emphasises supporting multilingual digital content, with particular attention to minority and endangered languages, as a cornerstone of genuine cultural pluralism online.

IV Digital Capacity-Building for the Cultural Sector

R7: Launch National Digital Literacy Plans for Cultural Professionals — Artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other cultural professionals are increasingly operating in a digital environment they were not trained for. This recommendation calls on states to develop targeted national programmes equipping cultural workers with practical digital skills: digital distribution, platform mechanics, data literacy, cybersecurity, and crucially strategies for protecting their intellectual property in the age of AI, where their work may be used to train models without their consent or compensation.

R8: Modernise Arts Education Curricula — The next generation of artists will work in a world where AI tools are ubiquitous. Arts education must evolve accordingly — not by replacing traditional artistic training with digital technique, but by integrating AI literacy while preserving the fundamentally human dimensions of creativity. The recommendation emphasises developing students' critical capacity to use technology as a tool that serves their artistic vision, rather than substituting for it. This requires retraining educators, updating infrastructure, and redesigning curricula to blend traditional and digital approaches.

R9: Establish UNESCO Chairs in Digital Culture in Developing Countries — The expertise and research capacity needed to navigate the digital cultural transition is heavily concentrated in wealthy countries. By encouraging universities (especially in the Global South) to develop specialised research centres in digital culture through the UNESCO Chairs programme, this recommendation aims to reduce the knowledge gap and build local expertise capable of informing national policy from within.

R10: Create a Global Network of Experts in Digital Culture and AI — Many countries, particularly developing ones, lack the specialist knowledge to design and implement digital cultural policies aligned with the 2005 Convention. This recommendation proposes establishing a global expert network — a knowledge-sharing and peer-support mechanism enabling countries to learn from each other's experiences, access technical assistance, and develop more effective policies for managing the AI transformation of their cultural sectors.

R11: Strengthen UNESCO's Internal Coordination on AI and Culture — UNESCO addresses AI across multiple sectors — culture, education, science — often in relative isolation. This final recommendation calls for improved internal coordination between UNESCO's departments, ensuring that work on AI ethics, cultural diversity, and educational reform forms a coherent whole rather than parallel silos. It also emphasises the importance of UNESCO's voice in global AI governance forums, as an advocate for cultural diversity against the homogenising tendencies of the dominant technology model.

What the Recommendations Don't Say and Should?

These eleven recommendations constitute a serious and coherent framework. But as someone who participated in the discussions that produced them, I want to be candid about what they leave unresolved, at least as they stood at the time of publication in December 2024.

The most glaring absence was Enforceability. The 2005 Convention is a voluntary instrument — states implement it at their own pace and discretion. Recommendation 1 proposed an additional protocol, but without a timeline, a ratification process, or any binding mechanism, it risked becoming another aspirational text. As described in the section below, the 10th Conference of Parties has since begun to address this gap — but the protocol remains a 2029 target at best, and its ratification beyond that is far from guaranteed.

There is also a Resources Gap. Recommendations 7, 8, 9, and 10 all call for capacity-building investments: national plans, UNESCO Chairs, expert networks, training programmes. These are the right interventions. But they require significant and sustained public funding, and the recommendations do not address how developing countries with constrained cultural budgets are expected to finance them. Good intentions without financing mechanisms are not operational policies — they still aspirations.

Finally, the recommendations engage cautiously with Platform Regulation. The transparency requirement in Recommendation 1 is welcome, but it stops far short of what genuine algorithmic accountability would require: audit rights, mandatory cultural diversity metrics, obligations to promote local and minority-language content. The EU's Digital Services Act and AI Act are beginning to establish this kind of framework for European markets — but globally, the gap between cultural diversity ambitions and platform governance reality remains wide.

What Happened Next: The COP10 Outcomes (June 2025)

Since the publication of these eleven recommendations in December 2024, the process has moved forward and the outcomes are significant.

In June 2025, the 10th session of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the 2005 Convention was held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, marking the Convention's 20th anniversary. It brought together 161 Parties (160 States + European Union) to assess progress and chart the future course. For the first time, the recommendations of the Reflection Group on the digital environment were formally on the agenda of the Conference of Parties, and the response was concrete.

The Parties committed to continuing efforts toward the adoption of a binding protocol on the digital environment — the very mechanism that Recommendation 1 had called for, and whose absence I had identified as the framework's central weakness. They also agreed to revise the Convention's operational guidelines to better address the growing impact of generative AI and large-scale AI models on cultural and creative industries. The Civil Society Forum was restructured to allow more meaningful participation — another step toward the inclusive governance that Recommendations 4 and 5 had advocated.

A concrete timeline has now emerged: in spring 2027, the Parties will examine a feasibility study on the technical and legal aspects of a binding protocol. If the study is favourable and the Parties decide to proceed, a protocol could be adopted in 2029 — at which point a ratification campaign would begin. This means that Recommendation 1, the most ambitious of the eleven, now has a realistic (if still distant) path to becoming Enforceable International Law.

The process continued into 2026. At the 19th session of the Intergovernmental Committee (Paris, February 2026), the Committee reviewed progress in implementing the adopted recommendations, including proposed revisions to the operational guidelines and a preliminary study on legal options for strengthening the Convention's framework in the digital environment. The machinery, in other words, is moving — slowly, as international law always does, but with more direction than before.

A Roadmap Worth Fighting For

None of this diminishes the importance of what the group achieved. In a field where international consensus is notoriously difficult to build, eleven concrete, actionable recommendations — agreed by eighteen experts from across the world's regions, representing radically different cultural contexts and priorities — is a real accomplishment. The debates in Québec and Paris were substantive and sometimes sharp: between countries that prioritise regulatory intervention and those that favour market approaches; between regions with sophisticated digital infrastructure and those still building basic connectivity; between those who see AI as an opportunity and those who experience it primarily as a threat.

The recommendations that emerged from those debates represent the most that international consensus could produce in 2024. The task now — for governments, cultural institutions, civil society, and artists themselves — is to push that consensus forward: to fill the enforcement gaps, to secure the funding, to hold platforms accountable, and to ensure that the cultures of the world's minority communities are not quietly erased by the logic of algorithmic optimisation.

The 2005 Convention was adopted at a moment of optimism about cultural pluralism. Twenty years later, the stakes are higher and the threats more concrete. These recommendations are a beginning, a map, before the new journey: Protecting the diversity of the cultural expressions in the digital age.

UNESCO Reflection Group on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in the Digital Environment, 2024

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