Heritage Exercisability: A Diagnostic Framework for Living Technical Heritage, Developed Through Norwegian Vessel Preservation
Safeguarding systems for living heritage commonly assess viability through designation, documentation, practitioner and recruitment counts, training, funding, and the condition of protected objects. Each indicator records one condition of practice. This article argues that continuity depends on whether those conditions coincide for the same people. We call that joint capacity heritage exercisability: the availability, to a specified bearer population, of the competence, means, occasion, and licence required to perform a practice, together with a route by which that configuration can pass to successors. The framework is developed through an analytical case study of Norwegian vessel preservation, drawing on published historical and survey evidence and on regulatory and policy documents. The case documents indicator decoupling: volunteer numbers grew while volunteers aged; specialist competence was protected in national centres while its distribution among vessel-holding associations went unrecorded; and protected vessels were conserved and certificated within operating limits that define where seamanship is exercised. From these divergences we derive a core profile of five dimensions—supervisory competence depth, cohort succession, consequential occasion frequency, means substitutability, and licence latitude—specify how they interact, and apply the cohort-succession dimension to the published data. Continuity should be assessed as a configuration rather than inferred from component indicators.
Published in Heritage, 2026
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