PERICLES enables sustainable use of coastal and maritime cultural heritage (CMCH)
Looking across Europe, coastal peoples’ cultural heritage (CH) tells a story of hundreds – even a thousand – years of connections with their marine and coastal environments. CH provides a sense of place, unity, and belonging to people; it connects people to each other and to the past and helps guide our future. But CMCH is at risk today from climate change, pollution, urbanization, mass tourism, population decline in rural areas, the loss of traditional fishing fleets, neglect, and inconsistent policies of sea and shore conservation across European regions.
Thus, PERICLES works to show the opportunities of Europe’s diverse CH, while protecting and preserving it for future generations. With calls for Blue Growth (coastal, marine, and maritime related sectors) ringing throughout Europe, it is important to make an explicit connection between the multiple values of CMCH, the risks it faces and the benefits of safeguarding it for future generations.
The ultimate objective of PERICLES is to promote good governance and the sustainable utilization of cultural heritage in European coastal and maritime regions through the development of a multi-actor, participatory framework. To meet this objective, the project has:
- Developed an in-depth, situated understanding of CMCH focusing on communities of meaning and communities of practice
- Developed and tested practical tools, based on stakeholder involvement for mapping, assessing and mitigating risks to CH and for enhancing sustainable growth via CH assets
- Established a participatory risk assessment framework for sustainable management, conservation and exploitation of CMCH
- Provided policy advice to improve integration of CH in key marine and environmental policies and
- Cultivated effective knowledge exchange networks among stakeholders, policymakers, and scholars alike
PERICLES reached key conclusions in fulfilment of these objectives. First, community perspectives are vital for identifying CMCH and its risks, especially in connection to intangible CH where deep engagement helps to uncover lesser promoted heritage. Secondly, digital participatory tools and platforms are important, but facilitation is often vital for initial and sustained citizen engagement. Through our work across European case regions, we recognized differences in digital cultures. Thirdly, our work underscored that CMCH serves multiple and diverse purposes, including tourism development, culinary traditions, local ecological knowledge and observations of change, recreational opportunities, but can also be divisive and used to valorize some while marginalizing others.
Our work has uncovered the significant gap in policy in terms of the top-down regime that remains dismissive of local-level work on CMCH. Communities are working to maximize their use of CH and we would recommend that governance be done differently to allow heritage to be used more productively at the local level. At the EU level, policies and directives including the Common Fisheries Policy, Marine Strategy Framework, Habitats, and Maritime Spatial Planning Directives do not explicitly include CH aspects and thus we recommend mainstreaming CH, just like it is done with biodiversity. At the local/national level, cases gave insights into the balance of local community and tourism development(s) and moved beyond tourism to that of portrayal.
