Provisions for community participation in heritage management: case of the Zambezi Source National Monument, Zambia

From Public Participation to Co-Creation in the Cultural Heritage Management Decision-Making Process

“…Public participation and co-creation, as methodologies/procedures, are already being used and practiced in various cases to ease the decision-making processes and to bring mutual and beneficial outcomes for the stakeholders, institutions, organizations, and environment users. After extended literature surveys and case study analyses regarding public participation in CHM, it can be estimated that these two methodologies, public participation (which already resulted in ambiguous outcomes in practice in the CHM domain) and co-creation (which has already been successfully applied in different fields and has the potential to be applied in the CHM domain), share several common aspects but also major differences [48][49][50][51]. It has been clearly stated and is well known, from International Policies and Documents regarding the CHM [5], that public participation should be encouraged and engaged and should contribute actively to the CHM decisionmaking processes throughout the whole process.…”

“…However, theoretically, public participation in the cultural heritage domain was initiated as a bottom-up and participatory approach [27]. Unfortunately, according to recent practitioners' statements and the examined cases studies of different geographies, it is evident that most of the authorities prefer to make their decisions upon heritage issues and problems top-down, without considering communities and their direct participation in the decision-making processes [13,32,37,44,45,[48][49][50][51] (Figure 4). This makes public participation a less democratizing principle.…”

“…These four extracted cases were examined and evaluated according to the following specifications/criteria: In this paper, only the conclusions and the results from the four recent analyzed case studies will be presented as notes in a comparative table (Table 4) [48][49][50][51]. After a contents analysis of the selected case studies from the developed countries, it is possible to understand that they have a common attitude towards the public participation/consultation process in CHM.…”

“…Another detected issue in the Zambezi case shows that manipulation is present due to a lack of professional involvement in the decision-making processes. In this sense, alternative co-management mechanisms among the different entities are suggested instead [51].…”

From squatter settlements to cultural heritage: the preservation and revitalization as “group of buildings” based on the case experience of Treasure Hill Art Village in Taipei City, Taiwan

“…For assessing the value of heritage to different groups within a city and together with appropriate visualization tools for new development should facilitate greater community participation, which is essential in any discussion of urban sustainable development (Tweed and Sutherland, 2007). Effective community participation is a topical issue in management of cultural heritage (Simakole et al, 2019). Participatory approach and community participation, engaging civil society, heritage community area increasingly used expression in heritage management and conservation (Van der Auwera et al, 2015).…”