Heritage Matters: Culture and Development in the Pacific

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Museums in the Pacific region have the potential to play a vital role in the sustainable development of their nations. They are associated with the preservation of tangible and intangible heritage, and have the capacity to communicate customary knowledge of the environment, and local approaches to resource management, work, value and social relations. But they are also institutions of civil society, able to support education and community cohesion. Heritage, in the Pacific, is not exclusively past practice, but the negotiation of identity and the attachment to place in the context of the economic and environmental challenges of the present. While universal models of heritage and of museums are not necessarily appropriate to Pacific settings, museums can constitute spaces of engagement and partnership, in which local values and accomplishments are foregrounded. Already institutions in which culture is represented and celebrated, they have the capacity to become places in which local approaches to the future, including prospective engagement with NGOs and donor nations, are assessed and explored. This pilot project will focus on two museums within the Pacific: the Solomon Islands National Museum in Honiara, and the Kiribati Cultural Centre in Tarawa. The project will aim to exemplify partnership, as opposed to donor-led, approaches to cultural heritage development projects, and will produce a report and journal articles, outlining the specific needs and goals of each museum, that could be addressed through larger, future projects. The project's comparative orientation aims to draw attention to the heterogeneity of Pacific settings, and hence suggest ways of assessing the extent to which successful approaches may or may not be transferable.The project will contribute to making displays and testing public and community engagement programs based in the two museums that are socially purposeful, effective and sustainable. The project will also make a concrete contribution to the development of professional capacity in Kiribati and the Solomon Islands, through the Indigenous internships offered, and through cross-cultural knowledge exchange between project staff, museum staff, consulted experts, and local people.The project will result in journal articles targeting scholarly and practitioner communities in anthropology, development studies, cultural policy studies, museum and heritage studies, and Pacific studies, and will generate reports for each of the museums, their stakeholders and for organisations with related interests, that will provide a basis for future work.