Public Built Cultural Heritage Management: The Public-Private Partnership (P3)

The topic of the paper relates to the role of conservation and valorization in the management process of built cultural heritage, more specifically in the case of publicly owned, complex properties. Although well-established opinions state that the conservation of cultural heritage as common goods basically pertains to the purview of the public sector, the par-ticipation of private resources and adoption of new business models may pose an opportunity for the public administration to intercept funds that have originally not been intended for heritage. Partnership is an organizational issue that implies some degree of cooperation be-tween different partners. The interest towards partnership schemes is the product of the multiple interactions they are capable of creating and the variety of opera-tional instruments employed to implement them. The importance lent to the rela-tionships established in public-private partnerships warrants that their theoretical models, their organization, and some considerations concerning normative as-pects undergo careful scrutiny. Since public-private partnership has already been adopted in the past and in diverse contexts, as for instance in infrastructure devel-opment, the paper does not focus on innovating this alternative way of funding, but rather on describing and analyzing this emerging phenomenon of transition between public and private organizations in the cultural heritage field, as it has not been widely adopted.