Heritage and Community Participation
How communities define, claim, and care for their own heritage, and the promise and pitfalls of participatory and rights-based approaches.
Definition
Community participation in heritage is the involvement of the people connected to heritage in defining, interpreting, managing, and benefiting from it, ranging from consultation to full co-ownership.
Scope
This topic covers community-led and participatory heritage: the recognition of heritage rights, co-production with source and local communities, and the politics of who is included or excluded. It examines instruments such as the Faro Convention's heritage-community concept, debates over empowerment versus tokenism, and the role of museums and heritage bodies in sharing authority with communities.
Core questions
- Whose heritage is it, and who has the right to decide?
- How can communities meaningfully participate rather than be consulted nominally?
- What does a rights-based approach to heritage involve?
- When does participation empower and when does it co-opt?
Key theories
- Heritage communities and the right to heritage
- The Faro Convention reframes heritage around 'heritage communities' and a right to participate in cultural heritage, shifting emphasis from objects to people and their relationships with heritage.
- Recognition and misrecognition of community
- Waterton and Smith warn that official appeals to 'community' often misrecognize real, diverse communities, using the term rhetorically while leaving expert authority and power relations intact.
History
Community involvement gained prominence with new museology and the ecomuseum, and accelerated through the 2000s as heritage studies emphasized social value and inclusion. The 2005 Council of Europe Faro Convention gave the approach a legal articulation, while critical scholars have scrutinized whether participation genuinely shares power or merely legitimates expert decisions.
Debates
- Empowerment versus tokenistic participation
- Scholars debate whether community participation in heritage genuinely redistributes authority and resources or functions as consultation that leaves institutional control unchanged, echoing wider critiques of participation.
Key figures
- Elizabeth Crooke
- Emma Waterton
- Laurajane Smith
- Sheila Watson
Related topics
Seminal works
- farobenco2005
- crooke2007
- waterton2010
Frequently asked questions
- What is the Faro Convention?
- The Faro Convention (Council of Europe, 2005) is a framework convention on the value of cultural heritage for society that emphasizes people's right to engage with heritage and introduces the idea of self-defined 'heritage communities'.
- What does participatory heritage mean in practice?
- It means involving the people connected to heritage in decisions about its identification, interpretation, and management, ideally through shared authority and co-production rather than one-off consultation.