#5 Policy Recommendation Area

Design a model for ethical cultural heritage practices

A participatory process is a sequence of participatory activities (e.g. first filling out a survey, then making proposals, discussing them in face-to-face or virtual meetings, and finally prioritizing them) with the aim of defining and making a decision on a specific topic.

Examples of participatory processes are: a process of electing committee members (where candidatures are first presented, then debated and finally a candidacy is chosen), participatory budgets (where proposals are made, valued economically and voted on with the money available), a strategic planning process, the collaborative drafting of a regulation or norm, the design of an urban space or the production of a public policy plan.

This process belongs to Policy Recommendations Toolkit

Design a model for ethical cultural heritage practices

#5 Policy Recommendation Area

Design a model for ethical cultural heritage practices

Duty of care

The ongoing socio-economic challenges in Europe and on an international scale call for novel and systemic ethics-sensitive cultural heritage institutions. Institutions are focused on their duty of providing access to heritage collections, while upholding their responsibility to manage the way the objects and data are being shared with wider communities. This can be achieved through the introduction of more responsible and ethical curatorial strategies and the democratisation of processes in cultural heritage institutions.

Broad take on ethics

Moreover, cultural heritage institutions have a mission to provide information in a reliable, transparent fashion, and thus can and should provide spaces for democratic and transparent dialogue to engage and empower different communities and broader society. The same rules also apply to the adoption of tech by cultural heritage institutions (eg. heritage for ethical AI) as well as CHIs’ environmental responsibility (specifically in regard to the digital realm).

Gap between strategies and daily operations

There is a perceptible gap between existing ethical policies and codes of ethics in the sector and their translation into daily operations in a constantly and dynamically changing world. The challenges and resistance to the addition of new translations into daily operations must be discussed at an international level, and lead to the integration of guidelines and strategies into the daily operations of heritage professionals.