Cultural Heritage and Policy
The study, governance, and politics of cultural heritage — what is designated as heritage, by whom, and how it is protected, funded, and contested.
Definition
Cultural heritage is the inheritance of physical artifacts, places, and intangible practices that a society values and chooses to preserve, and heritage policy is the body of law, institutions, and funding that governs that process.
Scope
This area covers critical heritage studies and the policy frameworks that manage heritage. It examines how tangible and intangible heritage are defined and valued, the international conventions and designations such as World Heritage, the national and local cultural policies that fund and regulate heritage, and the participation of communities in deciding what is preserved. It treats heritage as a present-day process of meaning-making rather than a fixed inheritance.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What gets designated as heritage, and who decides?
- How do tangible and intangible heritage differ in their management?
- How do international conventions shape heritage protection?
- How can communities participate in heritage decisions?
Key theories
- The authorized heritage discourse
- Smith argues that an 'authorized heritage discourse' — expert-led and focused on monumental, material things — dominates official practice, marginalizing the intangible, everyday, and community meanings through which heritage is actually made.
- Heritage as a present-centered process
- Harrison and Lowenthal frame heritage not as the past itself but as a selective, present-day construction shaped by current needs, identities, and politics, making heritage inherently contested.
History
Heritage protection developed from nineteenth-century monument legislation into an international system after the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention and the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention. From the 2000s, critical heritage studies, led by scholars such as Smith and Harrison, reframed heritage as a contested social and political process rather than a self-evident set of valuable objects.
Debates
- Expert authority versus community values
- A central debate weighs the expert-driven, material focus of official heritage practice against bottom-up, community-defined heritage, raising questions about whose past is protected and represented.
Key figures
- Laurajane Smith
- Rodney Harrison
- David Lowenthal
Related topics
Seminal works
- smith2006
- harrison2013
- unescoconv1972
Frequently asked questions
- What is critical heritage studies?
- Critical heritage studies is a field that treats heritage as a present-day social and political process of selecting and valuing the past, rather than as a neutral set of inherited objects, and examines whose values and power shape it.
- What is the 'authorized heritage discourse'?
- Coined by Laurajane Smith, it describes the dominant, expert-led way of understanding heritage as monumental, material, and aesthetically valuable, which can sideline intangible and community-based meanings.