ABSTRACT
Increasingly since the 1990s, museums are now being presented as a means to reach some of the goals of community development, such as encouraging participation of the marginalised and excluded, promotion of opportunities for selfhelp, and helping to bring about changes that can lead to greater social equality. The consideration of museums and heritage in relation to social improvement and change is well established and could be said to be central to the founding principles of many of our long-established local and national museums. Then the notions of change were closely associated with nineteenth-century ideas of the betterment of society. The more recent interpretation of the idea, emerging at the end of the twentieth century, has also looked to culture, museums and heritage as a means to bring about change. These new concerns, however, have more often taken on more radical agendas calling for a widespread transformation of social relations with greater access to opportunities.
