ABSTRACT
Sustainability is central to much policy that is to develop within the 21st century. Cultural heritage was not explicitly recognised, as a strategic imperative, within seminal documents such as the Brundtland Report (WECD 1987). Nevertheless, it increasingly appears in official publications relating to our cultural heritage, e.g. the Council of Europe has talked about Sustained Care of Cultural Heritage (Anonymous 1997) while the European Commission’s Framework 5 Programme 4.2.3 sought tools for the sustainable management of cultural heritage. The move to link sustainability and heritage is motivated by an admirable desire to preserve so much of what we value, but sustainability is not well defined within this particular context.
