What is the legacy of the European Year of Cultural Heritage? A long way from cultural policies towards innovative cultural management models

The year 2018 has been declared the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH). This initiative aims at celebrating European cultural heritage through a series of actions and events across Europe to enable people to become closer to and to become more involved with their cultural heritage. This paper aims at investigating the legacy of the EYCH and its impact on the management models of cultural heritage. By means of a qualitative approach analyzing both secondary and primary data, the research contributes to the academic reflection on cultural management by highlighting the link between policy, governance and management. The EYCH initiative focused on promoting transversal and integrated policy actions by participatory governance approaches. However, it partially fails to design a proper management model for the cultural heritage that could enable policy and governance innovation to take place.