Shifting Models of Heritage Management and Organizational Process in Multi-stakeholder Settings

The dominant management model for World Heritage Sites and the national park system assumes policies established or decisions made at the top of the organization will be transmitted downward for execution by subordinates who in turn pass needed information and feedback up to central administrators. Experts at intermediate levels bring specialized knowledge to bear in program development and policy implementation. In countries such as Mexico the long tradition of centralized power gave near-monopoly status over heritage matters to national government agencies such as, in the Mexican case, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (hereafter INAH for its acronym in Spanish).

Whatever its previous utility in recent decades the original model has been challenged by increasing resistance from stakeholders no longer willing to defer to INAH on heritage management, Drawing on more than twenty years of field experience in the Mexican state of Oaxaca this paper assesses efforts to move from a hierarchical to a network-focused model, a model more complex to organize and sustain but offering superior ability to anticipate changing circumstances. The paper emphasizes the challenges associated with the emergence of networks linking INAH with communities, other federal agencies, state governments, non-governmental organizations, private businesses, and other actors. Such networks have limited legal support, depending on coordinated efforts and shared values instead of expertise and formal institutional authority.  Using work with community museums as a series of inter-related case studies the paper underscores the ways in which negotiation, communication, and leadership address the contested terrain between INAH’s official dominance and increasingly-assertive stakeholders holding competing visions of heritage. Indeed one of the critical arenas of contestation involves the emergence of organizational innovations redistributing power and capacity.  Can new approaches to heritage management meet the needs of an array of stakeholders without undermining the essential qualities of Mexico’s heritage resources?