Craftsmanship and the politics of craft preservation

Craft preservation today unfolds within a dynamic and evolving landscape, where artisanal practices are increasingly framed as contributors to innovation, sustainability and territorial development. In parallel, craft governance has become more complex, involving public institutions, professional organisations and private actors such as luxury brands. This paper reviews contemporary preservation policies, identifying four main intervention clusters: certifications and standards, heritage recognition, skills and knowledge transmission, and entrepreneurship and innovation. While these often overlap in practice, they clarify the layered rationales shaping contemporary craft governance. Building on this review, we explore how the preservation of craft is operationalised through hybrid policy designs that address shifting boundaries and broadened expectations surrounding artisanal practice. The paper shows how hybrid configurations are enacted through a case study of Regional Law No. 34/2018 of the Veneto Region without explicit integration. The figure of the Maestro emerges as a carrier of institutional logics and a performative boundary object, stabilising fragmented policy expectations. The findings contribute to debates in organisation studies on institutional pluralism, role work and governance in creative economies.