Beyond the crisis: ecomuseums as devices for overcoming territorial challenges?

In the last decades, various community-based practices have emerged to propose alternatives to the mainstream models of extractive development. Amongst them, the practices of ecomuseums have spread and consolidated worldwide as opportunities for valuing territorial heritage, creating the preconditions for alternative developmental paths and ways of living. Ecomuseums appeared over the years as promising experimentations for an emancipatory approach to heritagization, and examples of insurgent museologies. Born in the 60s in the framework of the Nouvelle Muséologie, within the debate concerned with the social function of museums, today some ecomuseums have an interesting role of hinge between bottom-up dynamics and institutional processes in Italy. Specifically, they are currently working as an attempt to translate many of the assumptions expressed both by the European Landscape Convention and, more recently, by the Faro Convention, into practice. However, the possibility of making ecomuseums long-term stable territorial organizational structures remains an open question. This paper discusses the possibilities and limits of ecomuseums as institutionalized territorial governance structures: relational and organizational devices aimed at catalyzing processes for overcoming the current social-ecological crisis. The paper draws from reflections that emerged in a three-year research activity. In conclusion, I argue that long-term ecomuseal processes should work in tension between insurgency and institutionalization.