Heritage routes – new requirements for use of instruments and forms of collaboration in heritage management

The purpose of the project is to explore how heritages and cultural environments can represent sources for place development and what kinds of policy instruments and forms of stakeholder cooperation that can ensure sustainable management. Recent shifts from top-down decision-making processes to more collaborative approaches means that management issues are increasingly encompassed by diverse interests, goals and values. A central aim of the project is accordingly to provide knowledge on how these changes imply constraints and opportunities for the uses of instruments and for modes of co-operation. In order to examine these issues, we have chosen one of the pilgrim routes from Oslo to Trondheim and Telemark Canal as study areas. The heritagization of these old transport routes may facilitate the interconnection of different heritage sites, cultural environments and communities. One of the principal aims of this project is to examine in what sense management practices incorporate these kinds of potentials. In what ways the heritage routes may contribute to place development, and how the public and stakeholders engage with the routes are a central research questions. Given that pilgrims and canal travelers share the characteristics of so called slow travel, it will be pay attention to how these mobility practices can embody particular ways of relating to heritages and landscapes, and whether this resonate with moral and political evaluation of local inhabitants and various stakeholders as to how landscapes should be engaged with. An additional perspective is that slow travel has climate change relevance since this mobility mode involves the use of low-carbon transportation. Climate change issues such as flooding and overgrowth will focus upon. Qualitative and quantitative methods in mixed models form the basis for data collection.

The implementation of the project will take place in cooperation with central stakeholders as well as international research connections