(Re)Making Heritage Policy in Hong Kong: A Relational Politics of Global Knowledge and Local Innovation

Abstract

This article applies the global-relational conceptual frame developed in recent work on urban policy mobilities to heritage, a seemingly local policy area, in Hong Kong. In response to growing public criticism and protests in the past decade, the Hong Kong government launched a review of its heritage policy and the related institutional framework. This was largely an ‘extrospective’ process involving comparison and learning from other places. The article reviews this exercise, using as a case study a tertiary education programme that is a key node of heritage policy learning. The article shows that innovation must respond to the territorial specificities of land administration, culture and politics, and thus must be assembled locally—albeit in correspondence with globally circulating models and practices. Conceptually, the article proposes the need to understand the local politics of urban heritage from a relational perspective, attentive to both collective claims and interests and neoliberal governance.