Building synergies for cultural heritage: insights from theory and practice

The multifaceted character of Cultural Heritage and the efforts towards its protection from the impact of disaster, conflict, and urbanisation, require a synergic and multidisciplinary approach to counteract the range of threats and minimise trade-offs of single interventions. In heritage studies, synergies as a way to engage with, and incorporate, external knowledge are auspicated to critically revise the fundamentals of the discipline in terms of scope, methods, and epistemologies, and to broaden and advance contemporary enquiry (Waterton & Watson 2017). Yet on the operational level, the cooperation of different expertise, although increasingly common, is still a prevalently top-down practice based on horizontal knowledge exchange among experts and informed by methods developed and consolidated within the established (western) paradigms. This chapter focuses on multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder synergies in the integrated approach to cultural heritage protection and DRR practice, providing examples from the field, and discussing the most common obstacles and catalysts recorded from the ground that could inform future cross-disciplinary action. The chapter ends with a critical reflection on the state of the art, appraising current directions and suggesting ways forward to building upon virtuous examples.