Heritage and Policy

Abstract

The term ‘policy’ is often equated with being a means to achieve systematic state action. Heritage has formed part of a broad conception of social policy at least since the emergence of the nation-state, with its emphasis upon mobilizing concepts of national heritage. As the state’s role in daily life has grown through the twentieth century in much of the world, so heritage policy has become increasingly developed and formalized. Furthermore, increasingly we have seen not only policy for heritage but heritage as an instrumental device to achieve other social and economic policy objectives. Embodied within the idea of policy there tends to be the deployment of state power by elites, and critiques of how power has been deployed by state bureaucracies abound. In this chapter, brief reference is made to critiques coming from interpretive policy analysis, from a policy studies tradition, and the authorized heritage discourse (AHD), from heritage studies.