WITHDRAW FORWARD, PLEASE! ON PARTICIPATION POLICY IN ICOM’S WORKS ON THE ‘PRAGUE MUSEUM DEFINITION’

Abstract

ICOM’s decision to revise the museum definition valid as of 2007 was accounted for with the need to adjust the existing statutory phrasing to meet the challenges museums face in the 21st century. Having adjourned the vote on the new definition at the Extraordinary General Assembly in Kyoto in 2019, the organisation suffered a leadership crisis. In late 2020, in order to reform the management, a new methodology of working on the definition was introduced. Its foundation was to be sought in participatory policy, namely redistribution of authority. Interestingly, this approach was facilitated by the application of remote communication forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. In harmony with the adopted time schedule the extensive and multi-stage process was to climax with the vote on the adoption/ rejection of the new museum definition during the subsequent Extraordinary General Assembly in Prague on 24 August 2022. As a result of the participation in consultations of 126 out of the 178 eligible Committees, the ‘Prague museum definition’ was phrased as a compromise between the 2007 statutory definition valid until then and the ‘Kyoto definition’. On the essential issues, i.e., answering the question: ‘what is a museum?’, it actually retained the earlier regulation: a museum is a not-for-profit permanent institution. This yielded the question about the purposefulness of the works conducted in 2020–2022, based on the new participation paradigm, which the present paper attempts to answer.