Review of Cultural Heritage for Sustainable Development

- a Programme of Museum Cooperation in Southeast Asia

Indevelop (Stefan Dahlgren) is conducting a Sida Review of a programme of museum cooperation in Southeast Asia (MuSEA). Sida is evaluating relevant parts of its regional Asia programme portfolio in order to get a deeper understanding of the medium- and long-term results in relation to the objective of Swedish development cooperation, i.e. help create conditions that will enable poor people to improve their lives, and to find the most effective and efficient forms of Swedish development cooperation.

The first purpose of this review is to provide an objective assessment of the design, implementation and results of the programme. Sida would like to verify development results and draw conclusions from the MuSEA experience, to be used in future portfolio analysis as well as in Sida's reporting to the Swedish government.

The second purpose is to obtain a deeper understanding of how museums and cultural heritage institutions in Southeast Asia can proceed in their attempts to become viable vehicles for poverty alleviation, by advocating cultural diversity and cultural equality, and by providing useful spaces for intercultural dialogue. It is expected that the evaluation will feed into on-going processes of organizational learning and eventually have a useful impact on practice, but the evaluation itself is not intended to be directly used in decision-making.

The third purpose is to provide the programme and its coordinating function within National Museums of World Culture (SMVK) with a solid basis for its final report to Sida.

In the MuSEA programme museums in three countries in SE Asia and in Sweden worked together to create the moving exhibition "Stories of the Mekong", which describes daily lives for ordinary people along the Mekong river. The exhibition is now on display in Luang Prabang in Laos and will move to Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm during Spring 2012.