Objectives:
The Colonial Collections Consortium is a partnership between five Dutch organisations: Museum Bronbeek, NIOD, Cultural Heritage Agency, Rijksmuseum and Wereldmuseum, supporting institutions in provenance research by sharing knowledge and answering questions. The network includes research exchange grants and consortium grants to create sustainable research networks, with NWO (Dutch Research Council) awarding funding to 11 research projects within the call ‘Research into collections with a colonial context’.
Restitution Measures:
Collaborative research frameworks, comprehensive provenance research studying acquisition histories and the function, meaning and value of objects both historically and today for original owners .
Framework Limitations:
Funding constraints relative to the scale of Dutch colonial collections, challenges in establishing sustainable long-term partnerships with origin countries, complex coordination between multiple institutions with different priorities, difficulties in accessing complete historical records, and the need for specialized expertise in diverse cultural contexts and languages to conduct thorough provenance research.
