Heritage as businesses: COVID-19 disruptions to Texas museums, heritage sites, parks, and protected places, and their responses to evolving guidance

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted business services across all industries. Conflicting policies at the federal, state, and local levels further compounded business entities' delivery of services. One business often understudied in disasters is museums, heritage sites, parks, and protected places. While these entities carry the hallmarks of business, including business models, operating frameworks, and strategies for profitability, they also serve their own missions to educate while preserving and conserving cultural and environmental resources. In this study, we examine the impact during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on Texas museums, heritage sites, parks, and protected places with a focus on the evolving, and often conflicting, government policies. Texas serves as an important case study because it was one of the first states to resume normal business operations under state mandates. We identify through surveys and interviews that the ability of museums, heritage sites, parks, and protected places to adjust to the pandemic were temporally dynamic and highly contingent on sustained revenue streams, COVID-19 restrictions, and outdoor versus indoor programmatic offerings. Specifically, conflicting guidance from different government entities resulted in study participants' concerns related to safety and their lack of choice in removing disease mitigation measures. We also found that earlier crises prepared many entities to survive during the first year of the pandemic and that these entities' return to operations reflect the stages of disaster and crisis recovery. Our findings provide useful information for museums, heritage sites, parks, and protected places to develop disaster risk reduction strategies for future events.