Exploring impacts of participation in heritage management : reciprocal links between communities and heritage institutions in the case of Orkney Islands

This thesis explores the reciprocal links between local community wellbeing and sustainable heritage management, through community’s active participation in heritage. Special emphasis is placed on the impact of heritage participation on increasing social capital, and through this, collective level community well-being as well as perceived sense of place. Reciprocal relationships of the aforementioned impacts will be explored through a case study approach, focusing on small islands that represent common challenges of rural communities and landscapes: challenges towards sustaining both communities and heritage due to isolation, accessibility issues but also restricted resources that assert pressures on heritage management. The case of Orkney Islands, Scotland has been chosen as a representative example of islands where a variety of heritage participation projects have occurred in the last few years funded by Heritage Lottery Fund and consists the context of the study. The researcher adopts a bottom-up stance to impact evaluation that combines multiple perspectives: indicators of social outcomes are emerging from in-depth interviews and discussions with local residents and heritage managers. This approach enables a qualitative inductive exploration of contextually relevant impact areas, using social capital attributes as key assessment parameters to understand the leverage of participation for both heritage institutions and local community groups. The thesis aspires to challenge existing and develop contextually relevant indicators useful to define (and subsequently measure) wellbeing and social outcomes, in contrast to generic frameworks for impact evaluation studies related to heritage participation. It also proposes a framework for reciprocal impact assessment for participatory projects that combines considerations of institutional, instrumental and intrinsic values of heritage. The novelty of the contribution lies in providing evidence for the social contribution of participatory practices and relating them through the concept of reciprocity with knock-on impacts on institutional practices and heritage management approaches, ultimately looking at sustaining heritage resources on local level and supporting community well being through engagement with heritage.