Shared Committment: Towards a Participatory Model for the Development of Conservation Processes

Decisions faced by societies when managing their environment depend on many value systems: every territory is strongly tied to the socio-cultural identity of a community, which identifies it as cultural landscape. Despite the fact that built heritage and landscape conservation is theoretically consolidated, difficulties may arise when its principles are put into practice. If local communities do not share the decisions and the strategies implemented by the promoters, in fact, efficiency and sustainability of conservation processes are significantly reduced, and they may fail over the long-term. For this reason, research into heritage conservation is increasingly placing relevance on the openness of decision-making processes which concern heritage valuation and management, although roles and responsibilities of local communities are often a difficult field of discussion. The paper deals with participatory strategies as a tool to increase sustainability of conservation processes, with particular emphasis on built heritage. With reference to the Italian context, considerations about relations between participation and regulatory framework will be discussed, and the potential of community participation as a tool to improve the efficiency of prevention activities will be proposed.