Museums as tools for sustainable community development : four archaeological museums in northern Peru

Abstract

Understanding museums as tools for sustainable community development is one of the priorities of the international research project EU-LAC-MUSEUMS (2016-2020). This ambitious project has been explicitly designed in response to the European Union Horizon 2020 Work Programme call INT 12 (2015), ‘the cultural, scientific and social dimension of EU-LAC relations’. The project seeks to carry out a comparative analysis of small and medium-sized rural museums and their communities in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean (EU and LAC), and to develop associated history and theory. By researching state-of-the-art initiatives in museums and community empowerment, and then moving beyond these initiatives to implement actions in partner countries, our aim has been both to transform individual lives within museum communities, and to create a method of implementation and evaluation that will be applicable to wider regions.