Cultural heritage management and community participation. Participatory budgets as an example of decision and cultural heritage shared management between public institutions and citizenship

Abstract

Within the framework of a meeting comprising the link between cultural heritage and civil society, we will tend to track which relationship exists and can be developed between programs and community participation mechanisms implemented by public institutions and the attention to historical-cultural heritage. Citizens’ specific proposals on demanding participatory bud get processes (or different participation programs) related to local cultural heritage issues on their own municipalities exemplify the extant concern within civic sectors, as well as a willing of fostering this link and citizen opportunities to opine, to enquire and, when appropriate and specialist-oriented, to take management decisions. This fact contributes that heritage management become a discussion point for citizenship, while providing society an active role in the heritage treatment and application as a fundamental part of a community capital. We will briefly tackle the topic of community participation mechanisms as well as the action and research participative methodologies that can be implemented. Afterwards, we will deal with the possible links with heritage decision and management and finally, we will present some examples worldwide, although mainly Spanish, where this kind of demands of participatory budget have emerged.