The Costs and Benefits of Conserving Vushtrri Castle

Abstract

The question of whether and, if so, how to value heritage sites is a vexed one. In the UK, various organisations including H M Treasury, English Heritage and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) are preoccupied with it. The nature of this interest can be seen for example in the 2006 discussion paper published by the Accounting Standards Board under the title ‘Heritage Assets: Can Accounting do Better? (Accounting Standards Board, 2006) Also, in March 2009, a team led by Sarah Sayce, Professor of Surveying and Planning at Kingston University, produced a report examining the case for the valuation of heritage assets for RICS and H M Treasury (Kingston University, 2009). Both reports sought to explore issues relating to the valuation of heritage assets in the balance sheets of private and public sector organisations and both concluded that the system of accounting for heritage assets in the UK was inconsistent and unhelpful to those who rely on such accounts. Our purpose here is rather different. We are concerned with the valuation problems that arise in trying to determine whether to conserve a heritage asset and how much should be devoted to this purpose. For illustrative purposes, we use the case of Vushtrri Castle in Kosovo, largely because one of us - Kaltrina Thaci – has recently been involved in a condition survey of it (Cultural Heritage without Borders, 2012). However, we believe that the analysis that follows below is relevant to many heritage conservation problems. As our title indicates, we are concerned here with how best to assess the costs and benefits of conserving a heritage asset in order that judgements can be made about the extent of the resources that can sensibly be devoted to such purposes. That such an analysis is essentially economic in character should be obvious since economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources between competing ends.1 Thus, resources devoted to the conservation of Vushtrri Castle cannot also be used for other heritage conservation projects and nor will those resources be available for any other purposes however desirable those purposes