Sustaining public agency in caring for heritage: critical perspectives on participation through co-design

This thesis explores how heritage organisations in the UK are attempting to build capacity and sustainability in community groups involved in caring for heritage places during austerity. It is based on a broad interdisciplinary reading of critical perspectives on public participation. From this vantage point, I argue that the forms of participation facilitated by participatory initiatives in the sector are constrained by perceptions of public deficits and legitimate heritage expertise, which in turn are bound up in established definitions of heritage and its cultural significance. As a result, participatory initiatives reproduce the characteristics of network governance and incumbent democratisation, whereby community groups who share professional values are asked to augment professional capacity, as opposed to more critical forms of democratisation that foreground public agency. By critically engaging with my three case studies, Archaeology Scotland’s Adopt-a-Monument scheme, Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place interface and associated projects and my own co-design project with three community groups in Yorkshire, I demonstrate how public agency is limited in practice in each case, despite individuals’ critical intentions. In response, I argue that increasing and sustaining public agency in caring for heritage requires carefully designing participatory projects in ways that foreground participants’ skills and interests. My analysis demonstrates that in order to realise such interventions, they must be based in reconceptualised definitions of heritage and more nuanced understandings of participation deficits and legitimate heritage expertise. In doing so, my thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarship that argues increasing public participation is not a critical intervention in and of itself, but a means by which control can be both retained and relinquished.