62 CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 ‘field’ of our conservation practice. That plan characterised ‘Our identity and unique selling point (USP)’ as being ‘multi-disciplinary in character, inter-disciplinary in scope, and pan-disciplinary in aspiration.’ Today, though less wordy and less hyphenated, the principle is the same. Our current Corporate Plan states that ‘the IHBC operates a unique approach to assessing and supporting interdisciplinary skills’. Moreover, it outlines how we model and control our particular accreditation of personal interdisciplinary conservation practice, and how our regulation of that practice entails ‘at all stages… [a] credible, specialist, interdisciplinary ‘professional’ standard of conservation oversight’. If you do not recall this, it is worth reading again. Our model of conservation practice describes a practitioners’ interdisciplinary competence in the conservation of the built and historic environment, encompassing its rich complexities, changing challenges and increasingly diverse values. Our models of assessment and regulation, as well as our publications, awards, learning, career structures and more, are all framed by that same approach to conservation. We specify and advocate the public benefits of that conservation practice undertaken by specialists with interdisciplinary skills proven in the context of our assessment procedures. In this we establish a field of conservation that builds on the traditional mechanism of topping-up conservation skills in a discipline, but also looks well beyond it. There is neither need nor space here to delve into the nuances and tools supporting that approach. Our practice models, and the myriad ways we apply these models to extend our impact and advocacy, are detailed in our publications, website and sector services. But there is every reason to retread the paths that led us to mark out our unique field of conservation practice. Of course, the heart of our interdisciplinary practice model is the 1993 ICOMOS Guidelines. However, while many bodies rightly use that document as a guide, their focus is usually on its itemised ‘task’ list of ‘specialist activities’, from reading a monument to conflict resolution. Good though that list is, the IHBC’s focus is on the entirety of the Guidelines: the framing text as much as the tickbox-able listing. The IHBC’s own conservation skills-sets, our eight ‘competences’, were adopted in 1997 as part of our original charitable incorporation. Informed and inspired by a huge legacy of conservation practice in public services, they also built on decades of practitioners’ responses to rapidly evolving conservationrelated planning legislation. Our competences specified the skills sets of an ‘interdisciplinary’ conservation specialist, integrating personal capabilities in the context of a holistic, planning-led concept of conservation. That said, it was still just a list and, as such, allied more to specifying technical capacity than professional competence. Linking the IHBC’s Areas of Competence within the Conservation Cycle (2005) relocated the original competences into an intuitive and cyclical conservation process. These articulate a wider, accessible description of a generic conservation process: ‘understand’; then ‘care’; and only then, and when appropriate, ‘change’. With these stages formally cast as ‘evaluation’, ‘management’ and ‘intervention’, the Areas of Competence could encompass the breadth of disciplines shaping successful outcomes. It also meant that we moved on from them, establishing the architecture for integrated professional oversight of interdisciplinary conservation practice. The IHBC’s new conservation models offer a structured approach to specifying and evaluating interdisciplinary conservation practice and competence, enhanced by a project-led process even the World Bank would recognise. Focusing on what conservation professionals actually do, it enables the scrutiny of an applicant’s ‘interdisciplinary’ conservation competence in a cross-disciplinary context. But as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the PCO demands ‘evidence’. We will need to gather data – accredited members; categories serving as default proxies for career trajectories; ‘Jobs etc’ and NewsBlog services; and interfaces with commerce, research and learning. That will be another task, for when we know more precisely what our members and the PCO actually want. But for all the diversity and overlap of ‘conservation’ practices, interpretations, applications, understandings and, even misunderstandings, the IHBC has the main accoutrements of conservation pre-eminence in its own interdisciplinary field. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk
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