Objectives:
The PPROCE study ran from November 2019 until early 2022, supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science as a cooperation between the Rijksmuseum, National Museum of World Cultures, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies The project aimed to develop methodologies for investigating the provenance of collections with colonial contexts, working on selected cases from Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
Restitution Measures:
Developing systematic research methodologies, creating case study frameworks for different colonial contexts, establishing collaboration protocols with origin countries. The official Dutch policy, as outlined in the 2021 Guidelines for Colonial Collections, establishes a presumption of return for objects acquired under Dutch colonial rule if they were involuntarily lost.
Framework Limitations:
The project’s limited scope to specific geographic regions and time periods, reliance on available historical documentation which may be incomplete, challenges in establishing definitive proof of theft versus legitimate acquisition, resource constraints limiting comprehensive collection assessment, and the pilot nature requiring scaling up for broader implementation across Dutch museum collections.
