Cultural Heritage Management Plan (CHMP) Template
A 10-section structure for a cultural heritage management plan — baseline survey, chance find procedure, custody of finds, and coordination with the Department of Museums and Monuments.
10 sections · baseline to closure · with the standard reference behind each
The procedure is only as good as the first live find
A chance find procedure reads simply on paper: stop work, secure the site, notify the authority, wait for clearance. What actually determines whether it works is whether every one of those steps survives contact with schedule pressure — because a chance find always arrives mid-construction, on a day the contractor is behind, with equipment already mobilised on the exact spot.
That is why the trigger has to be written into the contractor's method statement rather than left as a plan-document aspiration, and why every site worker — not only supervisors — needs to recognise a possible find at induction. The failure mode is not usually bad faith; it is a crew that genuinely does not know a stop is required until it is too late to matter.
What the coordination protocol has to specify
- A confirmed contact. Not a department's general line — a named contact who has confirmed they receive chance find notifications, checked before construction starts, not assumed from the last project's paperwork.
- A response window the Department has agreed to. Stated in the protocol, not estimated by the project. If the Department cannot commit to a window, the CHMP needs an escalation route for when the wait becomes unreasonable.
- Custody in place. A find is secured where it was found, under a named person's responsibility, until clearance — never moved to a site office to "keep things moving," which destroys the provenance the authority needs to assess it.
A grave relocation is not a line item
Where a project genuinely cannot avoid relocating a grave or shrine, IFC PS-8 and equivalent standards require documented consent from family or community, performance of the appropriate rite, and compensation for the disturbance itself — separate from whatever compensation applies to the land the grave sits on.
Budgeting this as a fixed unit rate per grave, with no rite performed and no distinct consent process, is a recurring finding in project reviews — and it is exactly the kind of failure a reviewer treats as evidence the CHMP was written to satisfy a checklist rather than to guide what actually happens on site.
Questions
- What triggers a chance find procedure?
- Any encounter with human remains, a suspected grave, artefacts, or a structure of possible heritage value that was not identified in the baseline survey. The worker who finds it must stop work within a defined radius immediately — the trigger has to be written into the contractor's method statement with no exception for schedule pressure, or it will not be followed the first time it actually matters.
- Who has authority over a chance find in Uganda?
- The Department of Museums and Monuments, under the Historical Monuments Act (Cap 46), is the statutory authority for heritage sites and finds. The CHMP needs a written coordination protocol with the Department — covering site visits, authorisation timelines, and what happens if the Department does not respond within its own stated window — confirmed as current, not assumed from a general directory.
- Can a grave be relocated?
- Only where relocation is genuinely unavoidable, and only through a documented process that obtains family or community consent and follows the appropriate customary or religious rite. Compensation for the disturbance is separate from land compensation — treating grave relocation as a standard unit-rate engineering task, with no rite performed, is one of the most common and most damaging failures in this area.
- Does the CHMP cover sites the project doesn't physically disturb?
- It should. Intangible heritage — an ongoing ritual practice, a sacred site with no visible structure — can be affected by a project restricting access even where nothing is built or moved. IFC PS-8 treats this as heritage impact requiring its own documented response, distinct from and additional to physical relocation.
- How long does the chance find procedure stay active?
- For the full construction period, not just initial earthworks. A common failure is treating the baseline survey as having discharged the heritage obligation, then running later-phase construction packages — often awarded to different contractors — with no live chance find procedure in their own site inductions.
Read before you use it
Technical research
The software behind this
SmartLARMS keeps this as a live record, not a spreadsheet
A template is a starting point. The version that survives a completion audit is one where every change is attributed to a person and a date, and where the numbers reconcile to what was actually paid.