Assessing the Feasibility of PPPs for Cultural Heritage Enhancement in UNESCO Sites: The Case of Matera (Italy)

The complexity of decision making about cultural heritage has drawn attention to hybrid and innovative models to support the challenge of its enhancement. In this context, public–private partnership (PPP) has emerged as a promising tool to address the public administration’s lack of financial resources. However, several barriers have hindered the wide application of PPPs to support heritage enhancement initiatives, thus highlighting the need to provide decision-making processes with appropriate methodological tools, especially in contexts such as UNESCO sites, where heritage conservation rises to a global challenge. Based on these premises, the paper proposes a methodological approach to support decision making about implementing PPPs for heritage enhancement in UNESCO sites by evaluating the financial sustainability of different PPP scenarios, while considering their ability to ensure a fair distribution of benefits between the public and the private. After providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between PPPs and UNESCO sites in Italy, such an approach was tested on a case study, the “I Sassi di Matera” site that, over the last decades, has made PPPs a central tool for its enhancement strategy. The test results reveal the opportunities of the proposed approach to inform decision making and delve into PPP’s potential for heritage enhancement while outlining the related future research perspectives to ensure its broad scalability to other UNESCO contexts.