C O N T E X T 1 7 2 : J U N E 2 0 2 2 47 Accreditation and more with the IHBC: a strategic guide Seán O’Reilly writes: 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 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 ‘bigpicture’ 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. AREAS OF COMPETENCE COMPETENCES PROFESSIONAL 1. Philosophy 2. Practice PRACTICAL EVALUATION 3. History 4. Research, recording and analysis MANAGEMENT 5. Legislation and policy 6. Finance and economics INTERVENTION 7. Design and presentation 8. Technology Professional standards
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