The integration of heritage and sustainable development in the community context.
Creators: name: Stacey, Cynthia L.
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 1995
Subjects: subject: Geography.

description: Sustainable development is an emerging paradigm designed to strike a balance between the ecological health of the planet and human development in a manner which ensures that both meet the needs of the present without compromising the future. Sustainable development is looked to as an ethics guide from which better planning and management principles and practices can be developed. In this search for ways and means to work toward the basic goal of sustainability, attention has been directed to the linkage between heritage and sustainable development. Heritage is increasingly being understood as a source for meaning and as a basis for judgement amid the flow of global change. Heritage is the context in which people live their lives and it is therefore, considered the context in which decisions should be made. Heritage is most clearly understood at the local or community level and it is at this level where concrete solutions to environmental and economic problems must first be found. This research examines community-based programs which purport both a strong heritage orientation and a commitment to community sustainability. The purpose is to critically analyse the philosophical and decision-making tenets inherent in the programs and to identify the characteristics of the community development process which is the product of the union of forces sensitive to heritage and sustainable development. The Heritage Regions program in Canada, the Heritage Tourism Initiative program in the United States and the Groundwork program in the United Kingdom serve as case studies for the research. These programs and their respective community-based projects are analysed using a Management Assessment Model, a Sustainable Development Model and a Heritage Model as guides. The findings are analysed in terms of four central research questions which address program philosophies, program management structures and processes, consistency between the national program levels and the local project levels, and key program characteristics and attributes. Research results clearly indicate that the heritage and sustainable development principles are the foundation components for the programs. The heritage principles serve as the underlying philosophical tenets and the ethical and strategic principles of sustainable development serve as the general decision-making tenets to be used when relevant and necessary in program operation. This understanding of the principles and how they are operationalized at the community level reveals a blueprint for the construction of a different community development process. It is a process which enhances community capacity to respond to changing endogenous and exogenous forces through heritage and sustainable development sensitivities. Also emanating from the research are a series of observations and recommendations related to heritage based program structure and process and the transfer potential of program constructs. Specifically, the observations pertain to common denominators of successes and failures inherent in the programs and the recommendations relate to program replication in general, and to enrichment of the Canadian approach in particular. In this vein, emphasis is placed on institutional structures, management linkages, actor and agency relationships, methods to facilitate cooperation, and integration. Concluding comment prescribes future research avenues. Most notable are the need for a comprehensive examination of the heritage estate in Canada and an extensive assessment of community development as a product of the enriched process which emerges from the integration of heritage and sustainable development. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)