Abstract

With a clear public service vocation, Interarts designs and develops cultural cooperation projects with an international remit. It works in different world regions, namely Europe, Latin America, Western Africa and the Mediterranean. The article illustrates, in particular, the organization's experience in the latter and offers a number of lessons about the hindering of its activity in the area of cooperation towards development: 1) lack of financial resources, especially since the start of the financial crisis); 2) lack of trust between governments and Civil Society Organizations; 3) lack of legitimacy of culture as a contributing factor to human development (the latter due to the lack of comparable, quantitative and qualitative data). The need to build a reliable corpus of knowledge is advocated, for the recognition of culture as a structural component of policies and governance.