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Contribution short abstract:

While looking to heritage may contribute to reconceptualising development, instrumentalising the past for better futures risks reproducing depoliticised ‘top-down’ models of development, which aim to do development ‘better’ rather than fundamentally rethink the meanings and relationships it entails.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper explores the potential and politics of mobilising ‘heritage’ for development. Heritage can be understood as the use of the past in the present for contemporary and future needs. Appeals to heritage may inform radical reimaginings of development studies and practice. However, the utility of looking to the past to bring about ‘progress’ is also increasingly recognised within the formalised development and heritage sectors, envisaged in part as a departure from imposition of standardised Western models and a way to better recognise local context and knowledge. Such attempts often position heritage as a public good, and a form of capital that can be mobilised to achieve existing development visions and strategies more effectively, while development is treated as self-evident, uncontested, and always positive. By obscuring the extent to which what constitutes a valued past and a better future is contested, the instrumentalisation of heritage for development risks reproducing unequal power relations between ‘experts’ and ‘beneficiaries’, and within and between ‘communities’. This does not mean heritage is unimportant in reconceptualising development. Indeed, all around the world people frequently draw on elements of the past in responding to challenges and opportunities, or imagining a better society, including in claims for restitution and reparation. Considering how the past is selectively used to pursue ‘progress’, and whose pasts and whose futures are at stake, thus offers a means to better understand the dynamic processes through which we work out what kind of development is desired and how it should be achieved.