Assets in the age of tourism: the development of heritage planning in Ghanaian policy

Abstract

Heritage planning in Ghana is mainly governed by the idea of sustainable pro-poor tourism, but is only marginally integrated with general planning programmes and fragmentally addressed by policy-makers. Motivated by the general lack of research on heritage policy in Ghana, this paper examines the role of heritage planning in national socio-economic, cultural and tourism policy and highlights various ambiguities in terms of concepts, objectives and approaches. The major findings show gaps between rational and communicative planning ideals, between informal management systems and wider democratic concerns, and between delimited and comprehensive planning perspectives. The central argument is that the lack of coherence among different development planning perspectives is an issue that future heritage policy-making needs to consider in order to balance tourism development with concerns such as social stability, community development and local pride of place.