Institutional approach of self-governance on cultural heritage as common pool resources

This paper starts with definition and value system of cultural heritage, clearly defines the particular cultural heritage for following analysis, tries to explore complicated value system of cultural heritage, and the dilemma when cultural heritage preservation challenged by economic development impetus, or even poverty alleviation, thus to argue that cultural heritage should be defined as CPRs rather than public goods, determining the nature of cultural heritage is crucial for its analysis and governing discussion. Cultural heritage not only suffers from CPRs dilemmas, such as Prisoner’s dilemma at individual level, Tragedy of the Commons at community level and Logic of the Collective Action at group decision level, but also suffers from the problems of enclosure, congestion and overuse, which all makes it fitting in CPRs definition. Hence, governing cultural heritage should proceed in management from CPRs institutional approach, despite its conventional governing solutions, namely privatisation, state intervention and international regulation. Ostrom (1990)’ s institutional approach of CPRs self-governance based on voluntary cooperation could be introduced into cultural heritage management scheme, section 4 analyses how this self-governing approach could solve three general problems that conventional solutions could not reach, and demonstrates Ostrom’s eight design principles of long-enduring self-governing of CPRs could be applied to cultural heritage, thus to argue that self-governing should be a new supplementary approach for cultural heritage management in the future. Followed are simple case study and conclusion.