Heritage is a range of valued properties emerging through interactions among peoples, time, and places. In heritage management planning, perceived value has been the most contentious concept, not only proclaiming the existence of heritage places but also identifying their meanings and significances. Since the initial discussion of international heritage was recommended by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1972, the realm of the heritage agenda has been expanded widely in terms of its scope, from tangible to intangible, and its vision, from state centered, to regional, to global. UNESCO’s early promotions to identify, protect, and preserve cultural and natural heritage has upheld the idea of universal value by appealing to humanitarian goals and the necessity of collective protection, while, at the same time, highlighting the value of each listed heritage item as a precious shared legacy to be embraced by all mankind. The current UNESCO governing rules and regulations reflect such intellectual approaches and historical evaluations in order to establish heritage protection laws, policies, and technical guidelines to safeguard the crisis of heritage places on both local and state levels as well as to oversee a series of international resolutions to protect the most threatened places and peoples across the globe. Despite diverse levels of effort to protect heritage items, heritage specialists have been continuously confronted with a range of complex, challenging, and controversial issues regarding the protection of heritage and its diverse values. In many cases, acute tensions arise among the multiplicity of stakeholder groups who have different assessments of the intrinsic value of heritage steeped in the past, developing appropriate uses for the present audience and envisioning a sustainable strategy for the future.

To explore the concepts and strategic application of consensus building, negotiation, and conflict resolution in the heritage management planning processes, the Getty Conservation Institute, a US-based research center dedicated to the advancement of professional practice in the conservation and management of cultural heritage, organized a workshop for an invited group of practitioners with the assistance of the Consensus Building Institute (CBI) in 2009. This book aims to “fill the knowledge gap in the heritage field about dispute resolution concepts and methods, to identify typical challenges in the heritage sector that appear appropriate for application of these methods, to provide examples of how such challenges have been dealt with in the heritage field, and to identify related areas that are ripe for further work” (vi).

The book consists of nine chapters in three sections, comprising Part 1: Background Papers; Part 2: Case Studies; and Part 3: Conclusions and Recommendations. Some of the major agenda items introduced in the book are (1) heritage and identity; (2) heritage as a part of public policy; (3) heritage and human rights; (4) interpreting heritage; and (5) heritage practice. Part 1 introduces the key concepts pertaining to fundamentals in heritage and its dynamics as discussed in the workshop as well as an overview and conceptual application of consensus building, dispute resolution, and planning strategies for cultural heritage places in the collaborative process among different groups of stakeholders. With seven case studies across diverse geographic and cultural regions, Part 2 illustrates how heritage practitioners have dealt with a range of conflicts and challenges in local, regional, and state levels, including developing legislation, multi-stakeholder collaboration, tourism pressures, and working with sites of conscience. Despite different physical and contextual settings, the overarching issues in the case studies include: (1) conceptual conflicts to define heritage ownership (historical and emotional versus legal and political) in the cases of Quilmes (Argentina) and Lake Condah (Australia); (2) conflicting notions to interpret values (ethnic, symbolic versus public and economic) in the process of public engagement and tourism development in the case of East Side Manhattan (United States), Toledo (Spain), and Blue House (Macao); and (3) political and bureacratic challenges associated with large-scale conservation initiatives involving national, provincial, and territorial engagements concerning the National Preservation Act (Canada) and the El Mirador region (Guatemala). In Part 3, the conclusions and recommendations of the workshop participants lay out a potential working agenda with a glossary of terms, an annotated bibliography of selected additional published literature, and a matrix (appendix section) to classify typical issues and challenges in heritage place management on the topics of negotiation, consensus building, and dispute resolution practices.

This book provides a strategic manual to design better solutions and/or identify heritage issues to be resolved on consensus-based outcomes, considering interpretations in five core subjects: interests, values, identity, rights, and positions in heritage management planning. The case studies in the book demonstrate a range of peoples’ conceptual, cognitive, and perceptual differences while interpreting the value(s) of place, heritage, and identity in the management planning of historic places. Each case exemplifies unique challenges and conflicting situations during the public decision-making process. Such conflicts were mainly caused by unclear and overlapping mandates, limited resources representing incompatible interests, clashing values, disagreements over “facts,” histories of a negative relationship, and other structural factors such as unequal representation, power, and authority among stakeholders. As Hernandez Llosas, a contributing author of “Legislation for Canada’s Historic Places,” explains, many conflicts could be understood as a clash among universal validity by essentialist; social construction by particular groups of people; and cultural capital by economists (82).

This book highlights two of the most significant processes in heritage management planning. One is to establish a communication platform through clear definitions of roles and responsibilities for each participant in the collaboration process. The other is to conduct the situation (or conflict) assessment in order to understand the way the key stakeholders perceive the situation, resulting in an accurate, impartial analysis of their views. While conducting historical data collection, value assessment, and site interpretation in the multi-stakeholder consensus-building process, this book also emphasizes the need for effective dialogue among stakeholders through “joint fact finding” and “joint gains” when clarifying facts and issues and when creating values and identities to reach acceptable agreements for future implementation of preservation initiatives. To overcome a range of challenges in building consensus among diverse stakeholders, Stacie Smith, a senior mediator at the CBI and contributing author of “Consensus Building for Cultural Heritage Place Management,” suggests that the consensus-building process requires not only figuring out shared or overarching values and identities but also seeking the evolution of these things in the future to take care of the heritage agenda (56), which is key to creating comprehensive, flexible, and sustainable heritage planning schemes.

As a strategic tool to resolve intractable conflicts among the broad range of stakeholders and, ultimately, to reach common agreements, the consensus-based decision-making process is not a new idea in the various planning-focused academic disciplines and professional fields. Despite the growing concerns about the protection of heritage places and complexity in conflicting interests, there have not been many attempts in heritage studies to discuss when consensus-building techniques can be creatively applied to a range of emerging issues in heritage management planning and how it works to minimize or resolve notional, cognitive, and/or conceptual gaps among stakeholders. The value of this publication lies in its attempt to take the first step in exploring possibilities in applying consensus-building methods to a range of conflicting issues in heritage places across different cultural and geographical regions. Some criticism may arise due to the lack of justification for the case selection and a somewhat rigid application of the CBI’s formula, which could have been better utilized to add further analysis on what is missing or could have been added for heritage-specific conflicts and challenges beyond the general framework of consensus-building theory. This publication is a useful guide for any entry-level heritage professionals to understand the sequential steps and application of the consensus-building process in the design, planning, and management of heritage places.