Natural and Cultural Capital Dynamics: A Theoretical Framework and Empirical Evidence on Cultural Landscape Formation

Abstract

Landscapes with similar ecological endowments often diverge sharply in public attention, heritage recognition, and policy protection. One possible explanation is that places differ in the extent to which they accumulate cultural meaning through historical narratives, institutions, and place-based practices. This thesis approaches this phenomenon through the concept of cultural capital, defined as a stock that embodies culturally meaningful assets and evolves over time. I develop a parsimonious dynamic framework that treats cultural capital as a stock that accumulates, depreciates, and responds to investment, while natural capital evolves as a place-specific stock. The key linkage is structural rather than mechanical: shared landscape characteristics shape both initial natural conditions and the growth potential of cultural capital. Within this framework, cultural capital formation is influenced by geographic conditions and accessibility to broader cultural networks. Guided by this framework, I compile a county-level spatial dataset for China and proxy cultural capital formation using the growth of cultural points of interest between 2012 and 2022. In baseline specifications with climate-zone fixed effects and heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, weaker cultural accessibility, measured as greater standardized distance to historical cultural cities, is associated with slower growth in cultural points of interest. Terrain slope is consistently restrictive, and baseline nighttime lights are negatively associated with subsequent percentage growth, consistent with convergence from higher initial development levels. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that the cultural accessibility gradient is concentrated in counties that are relatively high in their provincial elevation distribution. These results provide spatial evidence on where cultural capital is more likely to emerge and highlight the role of landscape characteristics in shaping cultural capital formation. More broadly, the findings provide a foundation for future work examining how accumulated cultural capital may influence environmental governance and the allocation of preservation resources.