LAUSR

In this article, I examine the growing influence of nongovernmental organizations and the changing role of the state in cultural heritage policy. These processes rely on an accelerated transnational circulation of policy ideas grounded in a notion of culture as development and participation. In the occupied West Bank, several local but internationally funded organizations work to preserve the historic built environment, supplanting the heritage agency of a beleaguered, nonsovereign Palestinian Authority. In Italy, the government itself has disempowered its own heritage agency. Neoliberal cultural policy discourse has inspired legislative reform that has left the Italian heritage management severely underfunded. In both Italy and Palestine, the lack of state involvement has given nonstate actors increasing responsibility for heritage and blurred the boundary between the state and these nonstate entities. Contrasting colonial and noncolonial contexts, I show how quasi-colonial conditions of fragmentation and forms of state failure are spreading under neoliberal globalization. I argue that the current rearticulation of the discourse of heritage and cultural policy is intertwined with a general transformation whereby the contours of the state are increasingly frayed and its functions disassembled across a broad terrain.