Sustainable Heritage Management in Contemporary China

This PhD research aims to establish an interdisciplinary interrogation of heritage and sustainability. It investigates how these two concepts may be understood under a coherent theoretical framework, how they are debated in academic and public discourse, and how they are practised in complex contexts, focusing on heritage management in China. It explores ways to capture the complex, multi-deterministic, and interdisciplinary nature of heritage and the connection between sustainable heritage management and sustainable development. It aims to identify the fundamental mechanisms and conditions for un(sustainable) outcomes in heritage management and establish a nuanced narrative of heritage practice in non-Western contexts.

One of the research objectives is to bridge the gap between theoretical reflections and practice in the heritage field. This initiative emerges in response to the disconnections between the recent critical turn of Heritage Studies and heritage practices. One of these disconnections lies in the challenges of translating these academic critiques and critical approaches into operable methods to inform heritage practices, policies, strategies, and decision-making. Another objective is to overcome the Western/non-Western and tangible/intangible dichotomies that have led to overly simplified, essentialised, and even romanticised views of heritage activities in non-Western contexts in the recent development of the subject field.

The theoretical framework and approach, namely the Relational Morphostasis /Morphogenesis (M/M) approach and its relevant set of methods, were established in this PhD research through critically incorporating Critical Realism, Assemblage Theory and ANT. Case study research is chosen as a methodology and the ‘embedded single case’ model is used for the research design (Yin 2008, p. 92). The data collection was conducted through desk-based research and fieldwork. The data was obtained from four types of sources, including ‘documents, archival records, interviews, and direct observations’ (Yin 2008, p. 175). The data are analysed through several analytical methods, including ‘explanation building’, ‘time-series analysis’, and ‘cross-case synthesis’ (Yin 2008, pp. 212-255). Explanation building involves qualitative description, thematic discussions, and controversy mapping. The time-series analyses include two steps, a relative time-series analysis and a chronological one. For the case studies, this is achieved by identifying the morphostatic associations (labelled as Ms x) within and beyond the heritage assemblages, the morphogenetic cycles that these associations have gone through (labelled as Mg x-y), and the causal powers that contributed to the emergence, sustaining, transformation, and obsolescence of these associations. Finally, Retroduction is a reconstructive thought operation to create new knowledge and understanding from empirical cases.

The research outcomes demonstrate original contributions to knowledge on three levels. First, a theoretical framework is established to conceptualise heritage and sustainability’s relational, multi-deterministic, and dynamic nature. Second, a more holistic understanding of the case studies, a group of heritage sites with pre-14th century timber buildings in Shanxi Province, China, is obtained by implementing such a framework and the relevant methodology and methods. Third, the theoretical framework is developed into a versatile methodology and set of methods that can be applied in practice to understand, assess, and facilitate sustainable heritage management.