Scope

The service shall attempt to quantify the contribution (impact) of material cultural heritage to economical development in the stakeholder countries and regions over the past 5 years. Building on the work done by the European Heritage Heads Forum’s Economic Task Force and the European Commission, this research activity will define a list of economic sectors on which the material cultural heritage has an impact and perform data collection on the selected impact indicators.

The main outcome should be a common theoretical framework, defining the most important economic sectors on which the material cultural heritage has an impact and developing the empirical evidence of such impact. This research activity will also develop a blueprint or in other words a step-by-step plan on how to build a monitoring system in the stakeholder countries that includes all actions necessary to obtain and maintain data for the defined impact indicators in the future.

This study is named as one of the key studies by the “European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage” (adopted by the European Commission in December 2018). Economic statistics and indicators produced will be useful for understanding the economic contribution of the material cultural heritage. Overall the results will promote evidence-based decision making related to protection and promotion of material cultural heritage.

Main outcomes 

• A common theoretical framework defining the economic sectors on which material cultural heritage has an impact.
• A common methodological framework describing how to determine the impact material cultural heritage has on these economic sectors.
• Evidence (collected data and set of indicators) on the economic impact of cultural heritage in stakeholder territories / regions over the past 5 years (for example e.g. cultural heritage-related gross value added in tourism, construction, etc.).
• Step-by-step plan on how to develop a monitoring system (at the territorial level) to be used in the stakeholder countries, that includes all actions necessary to obtain data of the defined socio-economic impact indicators, building time series and checking and reporting the status of the indicators on a regular basis. It should also include an operational description of the data generating and reporting procedures

Stakeholders

• Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage (lead stakeholder)
• Brussels Capital region (Heritage Department)
• Flanders Heritage Agency
• Swedish National Heritage Board
• Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands
• European Council of Spatial Planners
• Romanian Ministry of Culture and National Identity
• Monuments Board of the Slovak Republic
• Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia
• Austrian Federal office for Cultural Heritage

Observer

European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture

Contractors

• Valdani Vicari & Associati: IT (lead contractor)
• KEA European Affairs, BE 

Deliveries 

• Inception delivery, 11 June 2018
• Interim delivery, 13 August 2018
• Draft Final delivery, 5 February 2019
• Final delivery, 31 July 2019

You can find the final report and all deliveries of the project on the archived website of the ESPON 2020 Programme.

Contact: Zintis Hermansons (Project Expert) [email protected], Johannes Kiersch (Financial Expert) [email protected]