The discussion with Dr. Vincent Guichard, leader of Work Package 1 of the SECReTour project, focused on heritage communities and their role in rural cultural tourism. Heritage communities, as defined by the Council of Europe's Faro Convention, are groups actively involved in managing and preserving cultural heritage. The project emphasizes the importance of local communities in tourism, advocating for authentic, locally rooted experiences. Research findings highlight the growing acceptance of the commons approach in Europe, particularly in marginal rural areas. Challenges include lack of funding and recognition, but the project aims to strengthen local capacities, scale successful practices, and produce policy recommendations to support sustainable tourism development.
Watch or listen to the interview here>>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KYISB1ewmk<< or below.
Transcript
Matevž Straus 0:08
My name is Matevž Straus, and this is a new episode of SECreTour video interviews. Today, we will be speaking about Work Package 1, specifically about heritage communities, and today here with me is Vincent Guichard, General, director of Bibracte from France, who is also leader of work package 1.
hello, hi, hello. Let's start with a simple, but maybe a complex question, what are actually heritage communities?
Vincent Guichard 0:44
Well, the SECreTour project draws on the Council of Europe's Faro Convention, which recognises citizens as key actors in safeguarding and shaping heritage as a living and evolving resource. According to the convention, a heritage community is a group of people who value and collectively care for a cultural heritage. What defines the heritage community is not only a shared attachment to a common heritage, but as well an active role in its management, transmission and renewal over time. We then define a territorial heritage as the combination of tangible and intangible resources co-produced by the action of people and nature, which give rise to a shared attachment between the territories and inhabitants, stakeholders and visitors.
As soon as these people organise themselves to ensure the long term future of these resources, we consider that they constitute a territorial heritage community. The consequence is that the heritage managed in this way acquires the status of a commons, according to the standard definition of the economist Elinor Ostrom, that is a resource shared by a community that establishes rules to ensure its its sustainability at a time of growing ecological concerns and of general crisis of nation states. The commons are back at the forefront of political debate after being neglected for more than two centuries. Public authorities are increasingly recognising the value of commons based approach to manage resources of general interest. Our times are also witnessing the emergence of new categories of Commons linked to new technologies. These include what we call the Digital Commons, which take the form of software that is collectively designed and freely shared.
Matevž Straus 2:45
So why does the SECreTour project argue that heritage communities are so important in developing rural cultural tourism?
Vincent Guichard 2:56
Well, SECreTour believes that tourism should be a tool at the service of territories and their inhabitants in rural areas. It cannot play this role without the active participation of local communities while intimately linked to the place where they live, its history and its values. Involving heritage communities in the management of tourism projects ensures that the offer is authentic, locally rooted and respectful and not imposed from above nor exploited from outside. Such management of tourism activity is based on alternative economic models, founded on cooperation and care rather than extraction or short term profit. These models can help regenerate rural economies. They support social cohesion, intergenerational transmission and civic responsibility, which are essential for resilience in depopulating or economically vulnerable rural areas. To put it in a nutshell, heritage communities are not only guardians of the past, they are also creative agents who contribute to shaping the future of cultural landscapes through sustainable tourism.
Moreover, the commons approach favours a policy of hospitality, a term we prefer to that of tourism, both because, as a supply, it implies an active, welcoming approach on the part of local residents, and as a demand, it can concern a wider range of beneficiaries than just tourists. The Commons approach is also a way of extending and increasing the impact of public policies in marginal areas, because it has the capacity to mobilise local stakeholders.
Matevž Straus 4:49
So in the past months, you have been researching and mapping different heritage communities across Europe. What are your findings? What are the conclusions of that mapping?
Vincent Guichard 5:02
Well, first of all, it is very clear that the commons approach is gaining increasing acceptance in Europe as an alternative to exclusive ownership and profit making. Marginal rural areas, which are both neglected by public policy and produce little wealth in the traditional sense, are prime areas for the deployment of Commons. Better still, marginal regions can be seen as a fertile ground for social innovation based on the commons approach. The first reason for this is that these regions, which remain on the margins of the economic development of the second half of the 20th century have preserved their heritage resources, much more than others, in particular, the landscape and their collective memory. In this context, commons of ancient origins have sometimes been preserved, or at least their memory still exists in the minds of the inhabitants. This is the case for example, of the transhumance routes in the mountains of Albania or the dense network of rural paths in the Morvan region of central France, which are the subject of SECreTour case studies.
Another factor that encourages the strengthening or reactivation of heritage communities in marginal territories is the weakness of the economic resources, which forces local players to pool their efforts. In some cases, we even note an ability to transform a painful or at least negative heritage linked to economic and demographic decline or to the former practices of the extractive industry into an asset for telling the story of the territory. This is the case, for example, for former mining regions in Slovakia and Slovenia studied by SECreTour. Combining the landscape approach with the community approach is also proving an effective way of taking into account the natural and cultural components of heritage altogether, it makes heritage communities a lever for providing concrete responses and inspiring alternatives to the challenges of global change in the mountainous and arid regions of Andalusia, for example, the reactivation of traditional irrigation canals is helping to revive a rich biodiversity.
Under the very different note, we can also observe how information technologies can strengthen heritage communities. This is the case of the community gathered around Ireland's historic graveyards, which mobilises the diaspora thanks to a digital platform. Successful heritage communities are built on alliances between a wide range of partners, combining local knowledge with broader expertise. In this respect, organisations such as museums and universities appear to play an essential role as hubs of memory, learning and exchange. In the end, we see how flexible the commons approach is. It appears to accommodate the most diverse legal and regulatory situations, and it deals in various ways with property rights in order to give precedence to collective use and interest. In return, public authorities in countries such as France or Italy are recognising the virtue and effectiveness of the commons approach as a third way between the state and the market capable of winning the support of citizens and promoting the common good. Conversely, building sustainable and effective heritage communities in marginal rural areas faces a number of difficulties, lack of funding, lack of recognition by public authorities, and difficulty in accessing technical or administrative support. There is a clear need for capacity building, particularly in heritage management, participatory governance and sustainable tourism design.
Matevž Straus 9:12
So after all of that mapping, what are the next steps in the work package? One that you're going to take.
Vincent Guichard 9:23
Well today, the project is moving towards strengthening local capacities by identifying tools and methodologies tailored to the needs of heritage communities in different contexts. We aim to scale up successful practices helping other rural regions adapt and replicate community based models of cultural tourism. SECreTour will also produce policy recommendations to advocate for the recognition of heritage communities as legitimate stakeholders in sustainable tourism development. Another major step is to get connected with the European network of heritage communities, the platform for peer exchange, joint learning and good practices developed within SECreTour will be an important tool for this. Lastly, we will continue to monitor and evaluate the social, economic and cultural impacts of the initiatives in order to inform more inclusive and sustainable development strategies.
Matevž Straus 10:24
Thank you, Vincent for all that information. I wish you all the best in your endeavours, and of course, we keep in touch until next time.
