Heritage governance in Hungary and Germany

As regards to governance of heritage, this is mainly identical with the governance of monument protection. Protection and restoration, this has a very long tradition in Hungary, like some other countries in the neighbourhood. From the 19th century, we have structures. And these structures have survived even, the Communist period, quite well. Now, with the new era, with the new technology, and with expanding to other fields like intangible heritage, this structure is something that we can build on. Unfortunately, in the last few years with the political innovations and turbulences, this structure has been shaken a little bit.

The reorganisation also of territorial responsibilities, from the government to the city, from the cities to the capital, from museums to authorities, and then back to construction authorities and so on. So this has harmed. This went against this stable tradition that we have had. But I am confident that again things will settle down, and we’ll capitalise from our almost 200 years of tradition of the field.

New approaches to governance in the culture heritage sector in Germany demonstrate a real, over the last 10 years, set of changes and new approaches for organisations such as museums, libraries, archives, so the classic traditional heritage organisations. And in our research, we are following a three sectoral approach in the research with respect to the public part of the sector, the private sector and actors, and the civil society organisations. And in the centre of the question of governance always in all of these different actor structures is how cultural policy making and administration adapt to the changing environment and the challenges. these institutions, organisations, actors are confronted with.

And a real serious, I think, governance approach in German cities exist in general terms as preservation sector of culture heritage. So there are many, many good examples to find in cities. But this is often in contradiction to the preservation and the development of contemporary spaces and art.