Participation as an effective way to stimulate multivocality in heritage discourse?

There is almost a consensus in Critical Heritage Studies that 'communities' should be given the opportunity to develop their own heritage discourses, instead of having to adopt the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006). Consequently, community-led, bottom-up participation is increasingly advocated as an alternative, much better attuned as it is to the increasing quest within society at large for democratic decision making and multivocality in heritage management. In practice, however, organizing bottom-up efforts to enable communities to develop their own heritage discourse is easier said than done. The communities involved are often not egalitarian and homogeneous. In this chapter, we use Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD framework) to analyze the case of Muro Tenente, an archaeological site in Southern Italy. The central questions are how the communities around Muro Tenente are structured, what their heritage discourses are and why, and whether participation has created room for more than just the AHD. As part of this study, we coordinated a series of interviews in 2018 and 2019 and observed three workshops in 2019.