Cultural heritage consists of tangible and intangible expressions of a cultural or natural environment. It is based on historically changing values, and the selection of which objects, monuments or natural environments are preserved creates different cultural narratives and societal consensus about both the past and present.
This paper explores how UNESCO’s heritage for development projects have tackled global challenges such as poverty alleviation among marginalised communities (economic dimension), gender equality and environmental sustainability (social dimension). It identifies key achievements and common pitfalls.
What is Cultural Heritage?
The term cultural heritage is often used by governments and museums to promote their interests in protecting works of art and other objects that are considered to have a cultural significance. However, it is a complex and difficult concept to define.
UNESCO’s definition of cultural heritage includes tangible cultural property (MCH), including buildings, monuments and archaeological sites as well as intangible cultural property embedded within them such as cultural traditions, knowledge and skills. The MCH category also encompasses natural cultural heritage – specifically defined and delineated nature areas of outstanding universal value.
Intangible cultural heritage includes traditional music, languages and other intangible attributes that are passed from generation to generation. All of these components make up a culture that we can preserve for future generations.
The Physical
Cultural heritage is the physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a culture inherited from past generations. It includes paintings, music, archaeological and historical artifacts, buildings, towns, and natural landscapes.
The concept of sustainable cultural heritage aims to preserve these monuments and make them available for people to experience. This is a little like the ecological idea of sustainability, which seeks to conserve nature without harming it.
While it’s important to preserve and share our cultural heritage, it is also important to let go of negative, harmful, or false traditions. Sometimes, you have to be the brave one in your family and break cycles of abuse or bad traditions.
The Intangible
Intangible cultural heritage encompasses traditions that are not physically fixed in any form-the unfilmed dance, the ephemeral folk song or the baton techniques of an old master. These ephemeral traditions can be easily lost to commercialization or even destruction.
But these intangible traditions can also be protected by laws and policies. Preservation movements in the built and natural environment have instituted a complex web of incentives and deterrents that limit absolute property rights in the name of advancing perceived public purposes. Similarly, arts companies have learned to live with modest constraints on their assets as they move toward a shared goal of preserving and making available cultural heritage.
The Social
Cultural heritage represents the cultural identity of a society. It is a combination of tangible and intangible heritage assets that represent the culture, values, traditions, beliefs and norms of a community that have been passed down to them by past generations.
Cultural Heritage is valued for its economic exploitation mainly through tourism, but also as a means of promoting social and environmental sustainability. Research shows that it creates an environment for the development of social capital, attracts specific skills (such as multilingual guides and archaeologists) and enhances technology, innovation, learning and entrepreneurship.
It is therefore essential to incorporate cultural variables into formal econometric models of growth and development.
The Political
The political dimension of cultural heritage has to do with the politics of recognition. Using the concept of heritage as a way to bolster privileged identities has material consequences for those from marginalized groups whose recognition claims may be denied.
This is especially true for the contested nature of the selection criteria used to define what is cultural heritage. The idea of cultural heritage seems like it should not be controversial, but the fact is that politics have a great impact on what is remembered and what is forgotten about the past.
The Economic
Cultural heritage is often viewed as an important part of people’s personal and collective identity. As such, it is important to them and they want to protect it.
This translates into protecting and preserving it, but it also means making it available to the public to enjoy. This can be done through museums, but it can also be done online as with the Europeana Collections where volunteers all over Europe are helping to transcribe and enrich handwritten manuscripts.
As with all goods and services, there are both direct and indirect economic benefits. The former are those that can be directly measured, such as visitors to a museum or tourist expenditure in the local region. The latter are those that cannot be directly measured, such as the broader socioeconomic impact of cultural heritage.