Stewardship of built vernacular heritage for local development: A field research in southwestern villages of China

Abstract

Built vernacular heritage as a driving force for local development, its effective stewardship could contribute to the sustainability of heritage resource and local development. This paper assumes that stewardship of heritage resource as a more systematic approach engages with different interactive relationships and relevant behaviors between public and private sectors and aims to explore how the sectors interact in the process of stewarding heritage resource for local development in the context of rural society of China. This paper is designed as a double-staged qualitative field research. In first stage, non-participant observation is conducted in 35 southwestern villages located in Chongqing and Guizhou and then three stewardship models of heritage are figured out: top-down, expert-led, bottom-up. In second stage, three villages as exemplars are selected in the scope of observation and then unstructured interview is conducted there so as to give further explanation of how well the models functionalize in practice. Based on the analysis of data, this paper argues that in each model of stewardship the interactive behaviors of different sectors are hard fact to disentangle, that there exists a hybrid of steward-like and agent-like behavioral orientation in their interaction. In reference to the analysis on the pros and cons of each model, this paper proposes that it is reasonable to manage and organize heritage resource within a new top-down model being characterized by networked collaboration between different sectors, correspondingly some specific suggestions are given in order to strengthen positive interface between different sectors in this model.