part 1 - Iccrom

MEASURING HERITAGE CONSERVATION PERFORMANCE
6th International Seminar on Urban Conservation
of buildings and sites with cultural and natural values
(UNESCO 1972), objects, landscapes and places
of cultural significance (ICOMOS Australia, 1999),
as well as living and intangible heritage (UNESCO
2003). Although this paper focuses on material (or
tangible) cultural heritage, its principles could
be used in the future to assess intangible cultural
expressions.
2. Further aims of conservation practice
Perhaps the most widely accepted ideas about the
aims of conservation are those established by the
Burra Charter and the UNESCO Conventions, which
consider that the primary aim of the profession is the
conservation of cultural significance and the values
that are entailed in cultural heritage. In this sense, it
is widely accepted that the primary aim of conservation
practice is to preserve the values attributed to
heritage and those aspects that give significance to
objects, buildings, sites, landscapes and traditions.
In recent years, however, professionals have questioned
the role that conservation of cultural heritage
must play in societies. Research carried out by
the Getty Conservation Institute (2000, p. 3), for
instance, has stressed that heritage conservation is
“an integral part of civil society”, and that conservation
can no longer be an isolated profession with its
own distinctive aims, but should reach out to people
and have a positive impact on society, including
social and economic benefits. British heritage professionals
and institutions have also emphasized the
role that conservation has in public life, arguing that
a further aim of conservation is to have an impact
on the social and economic realms of society (Jones
and Holden, 2008). That is to say, there is a clear tendency
of heritage conservation of shifting attention
from cultural heritage to the social agents that confer
cultural values to heritage.
Some recent trends have also gone further and considered
not only the values placed on cultural heritage
and the people involved with it, but also the
environmental impacts generated by conservation
practice. This is the case of National Trust, United
Kingdom’s non-governmental body in charge of
protecting the country’s heritage, which has proposed
the Triple Bottom Line Tool. This approach
draws on sustainability principles and considers
the impact that conservation practice has on people,
finance and environment (Lithgow and Thackray,
2009). However, it is worth noting that the environmental
aspect should not only be seen as something
to which negative impacts should be minimized, but
it should be regarded as an asset that could also be
enhanced, given the fact that cultural and natural
values are often closely linked, and natural values
are also worthy of conservation, enhancement and
responsible management.
Based on the outlined principles, an assessment
of conservation activities should consider the preservation
of cultural significance as well as a clear
understanding of the positive and negative social,
economic and environmental impacts that such
activities may bring about.
3. Assessing the performance
of conservation
In the field of culture and cultural heritage conservation,
it has been recognized that indicators need
to develop further since otherwise it is impossible
to evaluate the success of related programs. After a
thorough analysis of the world’s situation of culture
and development, the World Commission on Culture
and Development (1996, pp. 44-53) highlighted
the relevance of developing indicators in order to
obtain a finer picture of specific situations.
In the field of environmental conservation, an indicator
is defined as “a quantitative or qualitative factor
or variable that provides a simple and reliable
means to measure how well a desired outcome, value
or criterion has been achieved or fulfilled” (Schreckenberg
et al. 2010, p. 29). Indicators are therefore useful
for evaluating long-term trends, and informing
on planning and policy-making.
Indicators are also useful to encourage public
involvement if they are used with a stakeholder
approach. In this way, indicators can be used as reliable
data to address the interested public before the
reformulation of policies (see Figure 1).
Regarding the characteristics of indicators, it has
been emphasized that they should be both conceptually-based
and simplified in order to be practical
(Hubbard, 2009). It is also worth noticing that
indicators should always be dictated by the aims
of conservation and by the values linked to cultural
heritage that we are trying to protect. In this sense
it is important to bear in mind that the cultural significance
of each place or site is constantly being
reformulated due to the changing nature of values
(see Zancheti et al., 2009). This implies that indicators
need to be constantly reformulated in order to
account for the change in cultural significance and
the consequent change in the aims of conservation.
Therefore, conservation activities should not try to
Alonso, V. I. & V. M. Meurs. 2012. Assessing the performance of conservation activities. In Zancheti, S. M. & K. Similä, eds. Measuring
heritage conservation performance, pp. 1-14. Rome, ICCROM.
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