Mission
The goal of the CCI is to accelerate political, economic, and social development in poor countries and among underachieving groups in the advanced democracies. The CCI will add to the existing body of knowledge of how cultural values and attitudes influence progress as well as provide assistance to governments, development assistance institutions, non-governmental organizations, and universities interested in promoting the values, beliefs, and attitudes associated with progress. This will be accomplished through:
- Several additional country case studies to examine how culture influences development, and the forces/factors that promote cultural change, e.g., Barbados, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Jordan, Malaysia, Slovenia, Vietnam.
- Pilot projects that will test the CMRP guidelines for cultural change and facilitate replication in the areas of child-rearing, education, and values surveys, e.g., an experiment in child rearing training for mothers in Costa Rica, designed by Jerome Kagan, aimed at promoting values conducive to democracy, social justice, and prosperity; two pilot projects in democratic educational reform in Mexico designed by CMRP contributor Fernando Reimers of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
- Studies of the instruments and institutions of cultural transmission and change to include media and religion, e.g., world wide research on the impact of entertainment media on values, leading to a conference (the project designer/manager is Reese Schonfeld, first president of CNN); research on the impact of African traditional religions on values and behavior led by Fabien Eboussi Boulaga of the Catholic Institute of Yaoundé, Cameroon.