"Public Governance of Cultural Heritage". Using the institution of Trust to recover the degraded cultural assets owned by a Municipality

In Italy, the cultural heritage care has always been charged primarily to the State or,more generally, to the Public Sector, especially in the light of its natural aptitude to pursue general interests. However, nowadays the primacy of the public actors (first and foremost the Municipalities, viewed more and more as main actors in charge for the care of cultural heritage), risks being questioned by increasingly stringent budgetary constraints. The latter have been compromising the capability to guarantee a fair and widespread protection and to make the cultural heritage available to the community, as witnessed by the progressive accumulation of degraded or abandoned cultural heritage over time or the difficulty to provide any cultural asset with a proper endowment of personnel called to ensure its custody and public enjoyment over time. Although, in recent years, Private Sector has been more and more allowed to give its contribution to the funding and the managerial phase pertaining to the cultural heritage care, in Italy some doubts and cultural resistances have been arising. In particular, Private Sector has been blamed of being more prone towards pursuing economic interest rather than preserving the symbolic and experiential value embodied in each cultural good. Furthermore, in certain cases some operating hurdles have compromised the yield of few of the commonly-used Public-Private Partnerships forms. To date, there are two macro-trends impacting on cultural heritage care: on the one hand, the end of the monopoly of the public actors in the general interests care (of which the ongoing crisis of the Welfare State is one of the clearest proofs), as a result of ever-increasing budgetary constraints; on the other hand, the emersion at a Municipality-level of bottom-up initiatives. Such initiatives would bring out the willingness of “active citizens” to take on the general interests care and to make their efforts to recover and enhance the degraded cultural heritage, in compliance with the horizontal subsidiarity principle and the view of cultural heritage as a common good. Hence, in compliance with the mainstream of Public Governance, it is required not only to assume a holistic conception to internalize the contribution of the different key actors involved in the cultural heritage care but also to think about further organizational schemes that are likely to blend the features of Public and Private Sectors and, at the same time, to incorporate these macro-trends. In practical terms, each organizational scheme devised to cater for cultural heritage recovery and enhancement is called to internalize the point of view of a community that wants more and more valuable outcomes arising from the recovery and the usage of cultural heritage, conceived as a “lively community engine”. Moreover, if appropriate, each upcoming organizational scheme is even required to go as far as to enable the community to take part directly or indirectly of unprecedented shared administration forms. The present research, by leveraging the Dynamic Performance Management (DPM) approach, resulting from a combination of the traditional Performance Management (PM) systems with the System Dynamics (SD) methodology, aims to explain, in the context of a case study strategy, in what terms the institution of Trust can be an eligible institutional vehicle to recover and enhance the degraded cultural properties owned by a Municipality (in this case, the Municipality of Palermo), by involving community-anchored Third Sector Organizations. Going in depth, DPM approach is first expected to highlight the policy levers fuelled by key properties of Trust that might be toggled to boost the TSOs engagement. Then, it is called to identify the expected outcomes deriving from the recovery and enhancement of the degraded cultural heritage and to clarify how such a virtuous cycle could persist over time. The work has sought to bring out the Trust as an eligible institutional vehicle that can close the gap between the Public Governance perspective applied to the cultural heritage and the currently-recorded macrotrends. Moreover, it has shown that the organizational scheme and the related legal scheme are crucial factors to properly regulate the interests at stake and to stabilize a clear allocation of the responsibilities between the contracting parties. Eventually, this work has clarified which key aspects potentially internalized by the Trust can be conducive, in the light of the cultural heritage conception as common good and the ongoing macro-trends, to strengthen a fruitful cooperation between public actors (first and foremost, the Municipalities) and private actors aimed at recovering and enhancing any publicly-owned degraded cultural heritage.