The critical success factors for stakeholder management in the restoration of built heritage assets in the UK

Built heritage or historic assets (BHAs) constructed in the pre-nineteenth century in the UK are perceived to have certain characteristics which instill cultural significance in them and have seen them become valuable to the economy of the country. The heritage sector makes significant contributions to the UK economy through provision of tourist attractive sites, construction and servicing of heritage assets, heritage conservation, research, and commercial activities carried out within and around heritage assets. These benefits have seen them draw considerable interests from diverse stakeholders within and outside the heritage sector. Hence, a lot of attention is drawn toward restoration of such assets, from stakeholders of different interests, ranging from advocacies for no alteration to complete alteration of the heritage assets. As with construction projects, conflict of interests amongst stakeholders affect the outcome of restoration projects and the purpose of this paper is to examine the critical success factors (CSFs) for managing the stakeholders to achieve the projects’ objectives.

This paper examines the views and experiences of practitioners in the heritage sector who have been involved with BHA restoration projects. A total of 32 CSFs for stakeholder management, obtained through rigorous reviews of literature, were subjected to a severe scrutiny with eight restoration experts to determine the importance of the CSFs in restoration projects. The outcome of the exercise was a modified list of 20 CSFs which were further tested on 52 restoration practitioners in the UK using a structured questionnaire to determine the degree of importance of each of the CSFs in restoration projects and their relationships as perceived by the practitioners.

The results of the analyses performed on the data show that most of the CSFs were perceived by restoration practitioners as truly critical and vital for successful management of stakeholders in restoration of BHAs. The results also indicate that there is a strong consensus amongst over 50 percent of the practitioners on the rankings of the CSFs.

The identified CSFs could be used by the restoration practitioners as a “road map” for the development of appropriate solutions for successfully managing stakeholders associated with the promotion and BHAs restoration assets.

Although CSFs for stakeholder management in construction have been studied by many scholars, no specific research could be identified prior to this study to have been done in defining the CSFs for stakeholder management in restoration projects.