part 1 - Iccrom

Measuring Heritage Conservation Performance:
the seminar
Introduction
One of the great challenges for institutions and scholars of heritage conservation and protection
has been to develop instruments for assessing the performance of the conservation actions of complex
assets such as urban sites, cultural territories, landscapes and collections of many types of
objects. UNESCO, for example, has been improving its Periodic Reports on the state of conservation
of the assets on the World Heritage List in order to make the evaluations more transparent and less
subject to distortions caused by technical and political constraints. However, monitoring and evaluation
systems remain at an incipient stage; such systems would allow the performance of conservation
actions and their impacts to be identified, recorded and assessed in an objective way. There
are few conservation monitoring systems in continuous use and they are generally concentrated in
developed countries with well-established heritage conservation institutional structures. Costs are
generally used as an excuse for not implementing the monitoring systems, but also transparency is
not a usual practice in heritage policies around the world.
There are some other difficulties encountered in designing and implementing heritage monitoring
systems linked with the state of art of the conservation theory and practice. Ever since the Burra
Charter, the theory of conservation has been undergoing a paradigm shift that sets the maintenance
of significance as the central goal of heritage conservation. In addition to being informed by expert
opinion, this change indicates that conservation of complex heritage assets must take into account
the opinions of social actors directly involved with the assets (the stakeholders), and by doing so,
this introduces cultural relativism and the use of subjectivity as an analytical tool. It is well established
in theory that the assessment of the state of conservation of cultural assets is not objective in
the positive sense. It depends on the subject that performs the evaluation and the criteria used to
define damage or risks to the attributes of objects that convey values. This recognition does not put
aside the objective methods for evaluating conservation, but frames them in a contingent structure.
In this way, the use of indicators has been suggested as a useful way to construct a monitoring
instrument applicable to the different types of complex assets as this permits the performance of
conservation actions to be evaluated, as well as the associated public policies relating to conservation
including the enhancement of economic value, sustainability and social inclusion.
The 6 th International Seminar on Urban Conservation Measuring Heritage Conservation Performance
addressed these issues by analysing both the theory and practice of evaluation of heritage conservation
maintenance and of its impacts, and tried to respond to the following issues:
1) What are the consequences of change in the theoretical paradigm for monitoring and evaluation
instruments for complex assets such as urban sites, cultural territories, landscapes and
collections of various objects?
2) How can the performance of the conservation of heritage assets be evaluated over time? Can the
performance of actions on different assets of the same kind or of different kinds be compared?
3) What lessons are to be learned from the use of indicators in the evaluation of conservation
actions? Is it possible to estimate the efficiency and effectiveness of using these instruments for
monitoring heritage conservation?
4) Have there been experiences of assessment or of use of conservation indicators that can contribute
to the debate and so to the development of the theory and of the monitoring tools?
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