Capacity Building, Heritage and Community Participation: Examining the Gap Between Global Approaches and Local Needs

Abstract

Capacity building is becoming an increasingly popular agenda in heritage studies with regards to good governance, decision making and developing strategies for a sustainable future. These strategies aim to enhance the current situation in World Heritage properties, and in many significant heritage sites, within the scope of various key themes including disaster risk reduction, sustainable tourism, heritage management, involvement of communities, legal and administrative frameworks and raising awareness. On the other hand, these themes and general perspectives seem to remain slightly vague and inadequate in terms of site-specific practices, actors and managerial processes. The idea of empowering locally related communities and capacity building for autonomous decision making, for instance, is still a largely uncharted territory in heritage and management scene. Since some of the advised protocols for target audiences and areas fail to find a local response in existing dynamics of heritage sites, the gap between global approaches and local capacity needs requires further examination. These contemporary practices demand systematic results that can be transformed into methodological agendas to support sustainable heritage management and positive social transformation. Within the scope of this paper, main methodologies proposed by institutions and organizations will be examined and alternative perspectives will be investigated. It is also aimed to discuss the possibility of a locally oriented capacity building approach for community participation that may contribute to the overcoming of the practical inefficacy of global discourse.