What does conservation practice entail?

Practice standards are central to any professional body. In essence, that body must operate a comprehensive framework of understanding and analysis of a practice so that it can consistently specify, guide and regulate across the discipline and its practitioners.

The IHBC (Institute of Historic Building Conservation) enjoys support from practitioners with the vast range of specialist and non-specialist backgrounds demanded in built and historic environment conservation. However, that very diversity of practice legacies brings its own unique challenges. How can the IHBC, as the professional body for such interdisciplinary practice, ‘specify, guide and regulate’ core standards with sufficient and meaningful consistency when it maps to such a broad body of individual practices and their respective legacies. In other words, how do we compare apples and pears?

The problem for conservation generally is even greater than comparing such obviously different fruits as we must not let more marginal practice or practitioners fall outside our purview. Conservation is nothing if it does not enable inclusion and participation, so as well as comparing apples and pears we need to encompass tomatoes – legally a vegetable in the USA in some contexts!

For the IHBC, the challenge is rooted in what conservation practice entails. Built and historic environment conservation is an iterative process of resource management that begins with identifying and understanding the resource, and then its care, and only then any change, a change informed by the preceding stages. As such, conservation can require consideration across every and any thread, tangible and intangible, of our past and future, and – most important for conservation practice itself – our present.

That conservation process of understanding, care and change is enshrined in our corresponding ‘areas of competence’ – the core elements in our specification of interdisciplinary conservation practice. These are most easily appreciated by reference to the IHBC’s model of the Conservation Cycle. There the three overlapping ‘practical’ areas of competence corresponding to the stages of understanding, care and informed change identified above. These embody the holistic process of conservation and, by extension, encompass all disciplines relevant to the conservation outcomes sought, from ‘old’ archaeology to ‘new’ design, and from ‘big picture’ planning to the minutiae of heritage science.

No less essential to the effective operation of the Conservation Cycle is that each of the ‘practice’ areas – of understanding, care and change – must also be shaped by ethical and informed conservation principles and standards. In the cycle this is represented by the fourth, ‘professional’, area of competence, which informs and shapes conclusions across every discipline, practice, advice and action in the ‘practical’ areas of competence, joining them all together.

The Conservation Cycle model allows the IHBC to specify what conservation practice is – even if mainly by exclusion – and when it happens. If practice does not follow the model’s cyclical order of resource evaluation, management and intervention, supported proportionately by professional ethics and standards, it is not ‘conservation’.

The Conservation Cycle offers the IHBC’s own ‘comprehensive framework’ to help carry out what we demand as a professional body. It lets us ‘consistently specify, guide and regulate’ – and even compare – processes and outcomes across all relevant disciplines and practice areas. With the cycle, we can compare apples with pears, and those with tomatoes.

For all its value as a framework, our cycle is a conceptual model necessarily based on abstractions. In practice, we also adopt more familiar, largely self-descriptive terms, as represented by the table mapping the four areas of competence to the IHBC’s more accessible eight ‘competences’.

Similarly, when evaluating an individual’s level of skills, our assessments use equally familiar terms – from ‘unaware’ to ‘expert’ – in line with wider practice in skills assessment. In this way the IHBC’s own model of the Conservation Cycle as representing a unique ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ is firmly tied to more familiar disciplines and regulatory operations.

The recent revisions to the arrangements for the IHBC’s Affiliate category of membership show how our old model can successfully adapt to and operate in new situations. The re-cast of the Affiliate category first offered members in that former category the chance to progress from a historic but ‘unassessed’ link to the IHBC, to a formally assessed membership level. Today, the IHBC’s Affiliate membership is based on an applicant’s demonstration of their basic ‘awareness’ of conservation across all the areas in the Conservation Cycle and its constituent competences.

Here, the IHBC can use the cycle to specify a ‘baseline’ assessment of competence specifically and uniquely tied to interdisciplinary conservation practice across the whole conservation process. In this way, the IHBC’s new Affiliate category can serve as the first such ‘baseline’ interdisciplinary assessment in the built and historic conservation practice of our members, and the ideal steppingstone from early interests in conservation to formal accreditation and associated careers.

That is a unique, and perhaps even revolutionary, starting point for future conservation professionals, not least as it offers a credible starting point for learning in conservation, one that is firmly tied to international standards (ICOMOS and more) and global models (World Bank). As such, it should be expected of anyone in formal or indeed informal conservation-related roles.

If the Conservation Cycle seems largely intuitive overall, it gains not only clarity but credence when it can be so comprehensively tied to both external national and international models, and to our own membership accreditation. To advance, an IHBC affiliate simply works towards IHBC accreditation, where they need to demonstrate a higher level of abilities in the cycle’s areas of competence than the simple awareness of practice demanded of an affiliate. More details on the application and operation of the cycle for those seeking formal accreditation is available on our website and on our application forms.

The Conservation Cycle, its four areas of competence and the eight underpinning competences do not solve all the challenges of comparing apples, pears and tomatoes. The table lists other challenges – and some solutions – in operating consistently across the disciplines and practice traditions across the IHBC’s membership.

This article originally appeared as ‘Accreditation and more with the IHBC: a strategic guide’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 172, published in June 2022. It was written by Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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