ABSTRACT
How does heritage relate to its own history? This chapter explores the various ways in which past and present conservation approaches articulate. In particular, it highlights how neoliberal civil service reforms and “values-based” approaches are variously imagined as positive developments from earlier modernist approaches and through nostalgic contrasts with these pasts. Building on recent work on nostalgia, we highlight how the past shadows present institutional practice, contesting received ideas of conservation and bureaucracy as a linear series of temporally discrete periods. From this perspective, we show how the past is invoked to reflect on, critique and re-imagine contemporary institutional practice.
