Part III
Heritage Stakeholders:
Citizens, Audiences, and Workforce

While the study of heritage policy necessarily focuses on objects, environments, sites, and buildings, it is important not to lose sight of the real drivers of heritage preservation: the people. Heritage materials are vehicles and symbols of strong socio-cultural rationales concerning the public interest and ownership of our own history. Unit 7 considered economic valuations of heritage, but it is difficult to quantify the worth of heritage objects.

Heritage buildings have obvious use value but, for historic sites or landscapes, that use value may be defined as their appeal to visitors (which can determine market price for entry to a site). Heritage resources also have non use value, meaning that even people who are not using the site are willing to pay for its upkeep for the sake of its perceived intangible value to them. The concept of non use value is important to the framing of heritage as a public good (a good supplied in a way that allows all individuals to derive well-being from it without excluding the well-being of others; in other words, a public good belongs equally to everyone). Thus the public has an important role in determining value.¹

As previously noted, though, there is no unified “public” with a convenient set of values carved in stone. This section of the course considers the range of stakeholders in heritage resources. That Canada’s population—and the stakeholder population—is diverse, and is in the midst of significant demographic change, brings to bear the underlying relationship between cultural policy and the values of pluralism. Also important are the conditions under which professionals, amateurs, and volunteers work directly and indirectly within the policy environment to produce and maintain heritage resources.

Unit 8 focuses on museums as institutions that raise questions of the role of citizens as audiences and consumers of heritage. The final unit in this section examines how new technologies are influencing heritage management and interpretation, in most cases in advance of adequate policy.

Footnote

¹ Economics for the Environment Consultancy, Valuation of the Historic Environment, Report to English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Transport, July, 2005.