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

Petti, L; Trillo, C; Busisiwe Ncube Makore, C

Abstract

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none
of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the
resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other
Goals. 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, therefore
feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the
implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by
interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no
common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex
and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different
national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets
categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a
methodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross‐comparison of a selected sample of
publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study
confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with
a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus
confirming 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 culture
in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to
mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall
level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in
developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets.

Citation

the European Perspective. Sustainability, 12(3), 926. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030926

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 23, 2020
• Publication Date: Jan 27, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jan 29, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 29, 2020
• Journal: Sustainability
• Publisher: MDPI
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 926
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030926
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030926
• Related Public URLs: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability
• Additional Information: Funders : PRIN program—Research Projects of National Interest, Italian Ministry for University and Research; Projects : Protecting the Cultural Heritage from water‐soil interaction related threats; Grant Number: 2015EAM9S5