AHRC/DCMS Culture and Heritage Capital Research Call - bid recipients
Summary details for the 6 projects that have been funded following the AHRC/DCMS Culture and Heritage Capital Research Call.
Introduction to the Research Call
In October 2022, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport opened bids for funding in order to develop a robust and holistic approach for capturing and articulating the value of culture and heritage.
Research teams were invited to bid across 7 distinct strands, each comprising a distinct research question:
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Strand A - Developing a taxonomy of cultural and heritage capital services (associated stocks and flows)
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Strand B - Developing the link between methodologies that can measure why people value culture and heritage and economic techniques that can monetise value
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Strand C - Defining and incorporating non-use values into social cost benefit analysis and cultural and heritage capital accounting
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Strand D - Combining heritage science and economic valuation to articulate better the impact of care and sustainable usage of heritage assets
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Strand E - Overlaps between natural capital and culture and heritage capital
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Strand F - Triangulation of values using different valuation methods, research testing biases and ways to minimise them
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Strand G - Valuation of digital assets
The following research projects cover all of the strands between them, and individually address at least one of the aforementioned strands.
Bid Recipients
Developing a taxonomy for culture and heritage capital, Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, (Ms. Adala Leeson)
The project aims to develop a taxonomy of culture and heritage capital (CHC) that systematically articulates the multiple benefits and values generated by culture and heritage (C&H) in a way that enables us to give weight to culture and heritage in wider economic appraisal and decision-making.
“A taxonomy is the result of naming and classifying items into groups within a larger system according to their similarities and differences.” ONS 2022
The project will deliver cutting-edge research that is grounded in academic rigour , drawing on theory and practice from the arts and humanities, economics and natural sciences . It will consider the lessons and experiences of other sectors, as well as existing thinking within C&H to develop a systematic, interdisciplinary framework for understanding and classifying C&H, the multiple values of C&H and the benefits/disbenefits of C&H.
Through an extensive qualitative research programme the taxonomy will be located in the lived experiences and practices of stakeholders; testing, challenging, and refining the emerging taxonomy; considering commonalities and areas of agreement/disagreement with the aim to develop a common language and a co-designed taxonomy. The project will be delivered by a Consortium of academics, policy practitioners and consultants from the arts and humanities, natural sciences and social sciences including economics. A panel of experts in the arts, natural capital, policy, heritage science and economics will provide support and challenge, whilst network organisations will facilitate discussions with arts, culture and heritage stakeholders. The research will also de-mystify aspects of economics to empower the sector to engage more actively on an economic platform.
This links to Strand A of the Research Call.
Culture Heritage, People and Place: Understanding value via a regional case study, University of Liverpool, Dr Tamara West
This project explores how and why people value cultural heritage, especially in relation to understanding and defining non -use values and how these might be captured and incorporated into a social cost benefit analysis.
To do this it focuses on a current large scale cultural redevelopment project, National Museums Liverpool’s (NML) Waterfront Transformation Project. This case study provides an ideal pilot site which will yield nationally applicable findings and recommendations in addition to its relevance to regional development agendas. Liverpool and the city region provide a socio economic and cultural context that in many ways defines the challenges of evaluating cultural value(s). The city has rich tangible and intangible cultural heritage assets but it, and the wider city region, continue to face significant social and economic challenges and spatial inequalities.
Here, the value(s) of culture and associated practices can be seen to go beyond – or are, at least, not inextricably bound to- the economic value and are often difficult to capture. The research team, drawn from across the Universities of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores together with Research Partners NML, will address the following research questions via a mixed methods approach:
1.How might narratives of locale and culture be drawn upon in the identification and development of more multifaceted and relevant definitions of non -use value?
2. How do these values align with the wider cultural ecosystem, what are the intersections and gaps, and how might these be made visible?
3. Which cross disciplinary methods can be used to define and measure multi scalar locale specific tangible and intangible cultural heritage values?
This links to Strand B and C of the Research Call.
Understanding the Value of Outdoor Culture and Heritage Capital for Decision Makers, University of Exeter, Dr Amy Binner
Culture, heritage, and nature are closely intertwined in terms of people’s experiences but when a landholder has to make a decision about how to manage the land, such as how to care for historic sites alongside delivering nature recovery schemes, how do they weigh up options and make decisions about the future management?
This project addresses the practical problems of how to undertake robust social cost benefit analysis and how to adapt accounting principles to enable better decisions to be made about the way culture and heritage is managed, invested in, and promoted to visitors.
The project team brings together researchers from the University of Exeter’s Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP) with Forestry England and the National Trust, two of the UK’s largest landowners, with 13,769 sites across England, Wales and Northern Ireland comprising 5,467 square kilometres of land with more than 1,000 listed buildings, close to 1,700 nationally significant monuments and around 200,000 known sites and monuments.
Together we will engage with stakeholders and local teams to explore the way that people interact with sites, how this interaction is affected by management and investments, and what that can tell us about the different values provided by culture and heritage assets. The project will develop metrics and valuation methods to be applied across a range of culture and heritage assets and deliver estimates of the economic value of culture and heritage assets and their service flows.
This links to Strand A, B, D, E, F and G of the Research Call.
Triangulation of values using different valuation methods, University of Glasgow, Dr Patrizia Riganti
CAVEAT will identify and mitigate the caveats associated with current valuation methods when applied to culture and heritage capital to inform decision making. CAVEAT will explore how to best triangulate existing valuation techniques to assess the value of the stock (and flows) of a complex historic asset, such as a historic high street/neighbourhood, to improve decision makers’ confidence when using such results in Social Cost-Benefit Analysis (SCBS). CAVEAT addresses a key policy and knowledge gap. The protection of heritage assets requires investments in a regime of scarce resources. Historic England’s High Street Heritage Action Zone (HSHAZ) programme is an example of how conservation areas may require coordinated actions. Historic High Streets are currently suffering from the impact of businesses closures, and without investment in their conservation and requalification, cities lose a central part of their heritage.
A business case for investment requires decision makers to compare costs and benefits of the intervention within a Social Cost Benefit Analysis (SCBS) framework. The main problem they face is to fully account for the economic values (both use and non-use) associated with a cultural asset and articulate their social benefits, which cannot be captured by simple market transactions. A heritage asset is more than its real estate value, or the value people associate with its use. The nonuse value, linked to the cultural, aesthetic, and symbolic quality of the asset and/or the emotional attachment that communities have toward it, define such asset as heritage (Throsby, 1999).
The only methods able to capture the non-use values associated with cultural heritage are survey-based techniques such as choice experiment and contingent valuation, which can be used to express in monetary terms the social benefits associated with the conservation of historic assets. CAVEAT applies several economic valuation techniques to the same historic high street in an English medium sized city to assess the use and non-use values, and understand the reasons for possible divergence in estimates, sources of bias and ways of minimising them. These techniques capture use values (such as hedonic pricing (HP) and travel cost (TC) methods) and non-use values (contingent valuation (CV) and discrete choice experiment (DCE) methods). It investigates sources of biases, such as embedding effects (the problem of lack of variation of estimates with respect to the scope of the good) and information effects. It explores the role played by emotional attachment of respondents and compares the estimates of values obtained within the hypothetical setting (CV and DCE) with real-world experiments, where actual transaction for non-use values take place.
The results from CV and DCE are then tested against a comparable historic high street in another English city. This tests the reliability of results using benefit transfers (inferring the expected values at the comparable site from results obtained from the first site) between the two sites and suggests ways to minimise possible transfer errors. The main outcome of the project is a guidance for researchers and decision-makers on how to effectively and efficiently triangulate valuation methods for complex assets such as historic high streets/historic neighbourhoods and how to minimise potential biases. CAVEAT provides a framework for the development of future studies.
The research will impact the UK cultural sector and beyond. The project team involves two key international heritage stakeholders ICCROM and ICOMOS, engaging governments and experts worldwide. The project team encompasses expertise from various disciplines (architecture, urban planning, heritage conservation, cultural economics, environmental economics, heritage advocacy, policy making support) who have worked on these themes before and are committed to an interdisciplinary approach.
This links to Strand A, B, C and F of the Research Call.
Integrating Lifetimes in Heritage Capital, University College London, Dr Josep Grau-Bove
ITHACA aims to articulate the economic value of caring for heritage. This project brings together an interdisciplinary team, including Dr. Josep Grau-Bove (expert in damage prediction in heritage), Dr. Ricky Lawton (expert in developing evaluation frameworks for the UK cultural sector), Prof. Jane Henderson (expert in conservation and how it interacts with significance), and Prof. Kalliopi Fouseki (expert in critical heritage studies and the definition of heritage values).
ITHACA builds on the ideas of the paper by Sagger et al “Culture and Heritage Capital: using economic valuation methodologies and heritage science to measure the welfare impact of ongoing conservation, protection, repair and maintenance of culture and heritage assets” . The project will generate new knowledge and understanding of how heritage changes, and how the prevention of this change brings value to society.
The project will introduce new damage functions, the models that predict the degradation of heritage. It will focus on materials that are representative of the collections in UK museums: paintings, wood-based artefacts and art on paper. In collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, the functions will be applied to collections under relevant conservation strategies, contexts of exhibition, curation, and interpretation. This will reveal how lifetimes change with different conservation strategies, considering the balance between accessibility and preservation, and covering storage, intervention, as well as end-of-life decisions such as deaccessioning. This data will then be used as part of a prototype valuation survey, which will elicit the values associated with care and its outcomes.
The key innovation of the project is to advance towards an evaluation framework that considers the lifetimes of heritage. This framework must align well with the needs of heritage organisations and policy makers. The main concepts used in this project, the notions of “value”, “change” and “heritage asset”, are complex terms that are used differently by the disciplines that collaborate in the research. The project will explore these intersections of meaning, uniting the idea of value used by heritage scientists, which is qualitative and refers to the different dimensions of significance, and the idea of value used in cultural economics, which can be quantified in economic terms.
This links to Strand D of the Research Call.
Valuing Digital Culture and Heritage Assets, University of Portsmouth, Dr Karen McBride
This Valuing Digital Cultural and Heritage Assets project will use insights from behavioural and experimental economics alongside arts and humanities impact and value models to provide more effective valuation of cultural and heritage capital. We are particularly interested in establishing the value of digital experiences and interactions compared to that of physical heritage assets.
Through the design and implementation of a series of field experiments where participants consume physical and digital forms of heritage and cultural capital in different ways based on their decisions, this project establishes how the value of digital assets may differ from physical engagement. Based on this approach, the project will overcome several of the limitations of traditional economic approaches which tend to focus around hypothetical valuations obtained outside of the relevant use context.
An initial review focuses on synthesising prior research into the value of cultural and heritage capital in its many forms. A central focus of this review assesses previous valuations of assets that are born digital versus those assets which are digital surrogates of physical assets. A series of experimental studies to estimate willingness to pay for digital and physical collections and/or experiences will be used with audiences from a range of cultural and heritage project partners. This will offer quantifiable evidence on the value that can be attached to the digital consumption of cultural and heritage assets. However, this approach alone will not be sufficient to fully understand the complex nature of the value of digital cultural and heritage assets. A programme of qualitative research will further explore the reasons for differential valuations of cultural and heritage assets.
The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative techniques will ensure that digital cultural heritage value is clearly understood and purposefully used to enable decision making in the sector. The project will therefore develop a new behavioural toolkit of valuation methods that are more appropriate for valuing cultural and heritage assets in digital forms, as well as those that are ‘born digital’ with no physical equivalents. An industry and policy symposium event held at the end of the project will present and discuss the project findings and agree on future research directions.
The event will include short talks, and knowledge sharing and networking opportunities. The key focus of this project is around the valuation of digital cultural and heritage assets (Strand G of this funding call) and incorporates triangulation of values using different valuation methods (Strand F) in order to develop the link between qualitative methodologies to assess why people value cultural and heritage assets and quantitative economic techniques that can monetise value (Strand B). From a policy perspective, the project will help government bodies such as the DCMS to improve their understanding of the value of digital cultural and heritage assets.
Having more accurate valuations of these resources will assist in improving the diversity of output, which will help make both the industry and wider society more robust and resilient to future shocks and offer opportunities to reach wider and more diverse audiences. Not only will innovations in this space allow the UK creative and cultural sector to reach a larger, potentially global audience, thereby increasing consumption and exports of UK creative and cultural assets, but will also allow these industries the opportunity to better serve under-represented groups and help to improve mental health and well-being across society.
This links to Strand F and G of the Research Call.