PARTICIPATORY HERITAGE
Participatory heritage, in its multifaceted aspects, has been a rather novel concept within cultural policy since the early 2000s. The term gained prominence in the cultural policy area with the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and the Council of Europe’s Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention, 2005). However, discussions about citizens’ involvement in heritage have been present in museum and heritage practice and studies for much longer, especially since the 1960s and 1970s.
In its core, the term signifies that heritage is not and should not be just a matter of institutions and trained professionals, but a matter of ordinary citizens’ engagement in archiving, collecting, safeguarding, interpreting, and presenting heritage. Alternative terms describing the same phenomenon include ‘participation in heritage’, ‘community engagement in heritage’, ‘citizens engagement in heritage’, ‘bottom-up heritage’, and similar terms.
The notions and concepts used to describe the need and relevance of citizens’ engagement in heritage vary greatly, from already mentioned notions through specific models of organisational structures such as ‘ecomuseums’, ‘community museums’, ‘participatory museums’ or ‘community archives’, to specific aspects and practices in which citizens are involved, such as ‘co-curating’, ‘crowd-collecting’, ‘participatory archaeology’, and the like. However different, all these organisational structures and practices aspire to redistribute the power to decide what should be remembered and safeguarded from institutions and professionals to wider groups of citizens.
Discussions of participatory heritage concern questions of authority, roles, relations, and power between heritage institutions and professionals on the one hand and citizens, amateurs, and communities on the other, begging the question: who can participate and in which way?
Some approaches use the term in a very narrow sense, as ‘participatory consumption of heritage’. In practice, this means that institutions and professionals keep all authority for valorisation, selection, and curation of heritage and involve citizens inasmuch as they use new technologies to explore, like, or comment on the offered content. Other approaches see participatory heritage as numerous ways and methods in which institutions and professionals share rights and responsibilities with citizens, actively engaging and encouraging them to take part in co-curating, archiving, maintaining, and safeguarding heritage.
Finally, there are participatory heritage approaches based on reclaiming rights to heritage by citizens. These approaches treat heritage as a common in which citizens organise to take care of, value and safeguard aspects of memory, heritage, and history that they find important. They are particularly relevant for migrant or marginalised social groups since such groups, through participatory heritage practices, can protect and communicate heritage that has been marginalised or neglected by dominant institutions and memory politics.
Participatory heritage practices bring new challenges as well as new opportunities to policymakers, especially when it comes to questions about how to recognise, encourage, and support participation in heritage. When it comes to opportunities, one should point out that participatory heritage, in its broadest sense, encourages citizens to be active players in heritage safeguarding. It contributes to the social protection of heritage and to a sense of cohesion among communities. It also widens the scope of heritage to include those aspects, practices, identities, narratives, and knowledge from the past that are neglected by public institutions and professionals. On the other hand, the challenging aspects of participatory heritage lie in reinforcing the exclusive identities of social groups and a failure to safeguard heritage according to legal and professional standards. Finally, it should be noted that participatory heritage approaches open the question of how policymakers can support heritage institutions to become more participatory and inclusive. Likewise, it invites us to think about how professional education can train future professionals to safeguard heritage in partnership with citizens and communities. (VK, GT)