Cultural heritage and sustainable developmenttargets : a possible harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective

Abstract

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although noneof the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, theresulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to otherGoals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore,it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, thereforefeeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging theimplementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, byinterrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is nocommon dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complexand diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by differentnational databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assetscategories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot amethodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross‐comparison of a selected sample ofpublicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this studyconfirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs witha broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thusconfirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories.However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culturein sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible tomainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overalllevel of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed indeveloping a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets