Imagine that a team of architects, tourism consultants, and government officials decides to “preserve” your neighborhood’s heritage. They document the buildings, design a tourist route, and open a heritage center. Nobody asked your family what you value, what you practice, or what you want future generations to remember. Is what they preserved really your heritage?
PART A – WHY COMMUNITY AGENCY IS NOT OPTIONAL
Heritage does not exist in buildings, objects, or archives. It exists in people – in the choices communities make every day about what to practice, teach, transmit, and protect. The moment a community stops recognizing a tradition as its own, the tradition ceases to be living heritage and becomes a historical record.
This is why the UNESCO 2003 Convention placed communities at the absolute center of ICH safeguarding. Article 15 states that states parties shall “endeavor to ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups and, where appropriate, individuals that create, maintain and transmit such heritage.” This is not a courtesy. It is the definition of what makes something heritage in the first place.
Community agency means more than participation. It means control: over what is documented, what is promoted, what is shown to visitors, what is kept private, and how resources generated by heritage tourism are distributed. When communities have agency, heritage tourism is a tool for self-determination. When they do not, it is a form of extraction.
Three things that happen when community agency is absent:
Misrepresentation: Outside curators, tour operators, or government bodies tell simplified, romanticized, or politically convenient versions of a community’s heritage. Complexity, conflict, and living tensions are erased. The heritage on display no longer reflects the community that created it.
Exclusion from benefits: Tourism revenue flows to external operators. The community provides the heritage; others profit from it. Community members may work in low-wage service jobs while the economic surplus leaves the territory.
Accelerated loss: Without community investment in a tradition – without the pride, the practice, and the intergenerational desire to maintain it – heritage decays faster, not slower. External management cannot substitute for community care.
PART B – METHODS FOR COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
1. Participatory heritage mapping
Participatory mapping brings together residents, local researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to identify and document what the community values – not what experts or tourists assume they value. The result is a heritage map that includes not only physical sites (churches, historic buildings, workshops) but intangible practices: songs sung at specific times of year, routes walked for seasonal rituals, spaces where particular crafts are taught.
What makes it participatory is the process: community members lead or co-lead the mapping. They decide what goes on the map. They define the categories. The final document belongs to the community, not to the institution that initiated the exercise.
In the INTHRACE pedagogical model (Component 02), participatory mapping is a core activity: students design “participatory heritage maps that contrast community-valued heritage with tourist-attracted ones.” This contrast is itself revealing. The gap between what communities treasure and what tourism promotes tells you where the most significant risks of distortion lie.
2. Co-creation of heritage narratives
Every heritage site tells a story. The question is: who decides which story, in whose words, from whose perspective?
Co-creation of narratives means that the community – not only professional heritage interpreters, curators, or marketing agencies – shapes how its traditions are explained and presented. This involves:
- Oral history collection and community validation before anything is published or displayed.
- Multilingual and multi-voice presentation that includes minority languages, elder voices, and contested memories alongside official narratives.
- Community review of interpretive materials (brochures, exhibition texts, website content) before they go public.
- Ongoing rights: the community retains the right to revise, update, or withdraw narratives as its relationship with the heritage evolves.
At the Batana Eco-Museum, the museum’s multimedia exhibitions were built from recordings, testimonies, and materials contributed by Rovinj’s fishing families. The exhibitions speak in the Rovinj dialect alongside Croatian and Italian. The fishermen’s bitinada music is documented by the community and presented in their own words. The result is a narrative that visitors recognize as genuine precisely because it has not been simplified for their convenience.
3. Community-led governance of heritage institutions
The most advanced form of community involvement is governance: communities that do not merely contribute to heritage institutions but actually run them.
The Batana Eco-Museum is managed by the Batana House Association, a community organization. Local fishermen and residents participate in decisions about programming, exhibitions, events, and partnerships. The museum is formally embedded in the community rather than being a state institution that happens to be located there.
Kumrovec’s Centre for Traditional Crafts and Skills (est. 2007) involves local artisans not as performers or demonstrators hired by the museum, but as active participants in defining which crafts are preserved, how they are taught, and how they connect to the broader local economy.
4. Intergenerational transmission as community involvement
The most direct form of community involvement in heritage is transmission: passing skills, stories, and practices from one generation to the next. This is what makes heritage living rather than archived.
Both case studies invest heavily in intergenerational programming:
Batana: Community festivals, regattas, and boat-building at the Mali Škver shipyard create regular occasions for younger Rovinj residents to be in contact with the maritime traditions. The visual arts center connects younger community members to the cultural expressions of maritime life.
Kumrovec: Workshops like “My Grandmother’s Easter Eggs,” “From Grain to Bread,” and “Make Your Own Doll” are deliberately designed to create moments of knowledge transfer between generations. Grandparents teach grandchildren; schools bring children into contact with craft practitioners. The museum acts as a structured occasion for transmission that might not happen organically in contemporary family life.
This is a crucial insight: in many communities, heritage institutions now perform a transmission function that was previously embedded in daily life. As urbanization, migration, and digital culture change how families spend time together, heritage institutions become places where intergenerational contact around shared practices is deliberately engineered.
PART C – CASE STUDIES IN COMMUNITY AGENCY
Batana Eco-Museum: fishermen as curators
When the Batana Eco-Museum was established in 2004, its founding principle was that the museum would be made by the community of Rovinj, not for it. Local fishermen were not hired to demonstrate traditional techniques for tourists. They were invited to be co-authors of the institution.
In practice this means:
- Fishermen and residents actively participate in curating the exhibitions.
- They organize and lead the thematic regattas and cultural events.
- They facilitate workshops on traditional skills – net mending, rope braiding – for both community members and interested visitors.
- The Batana Visual Arts Center involves community members in cultural programming throughout the year.
- The museum documents and preserves community oral history, family stories, and the bitinada music tradition through recordings contributed by community members themselves.
The result is an institution that the community of Rovinj recognizes as its own. This recognition – not UNESCO inscription, not international tourism awards, not visitor numbers – is what sustains the museum. It is also what makes it transferable as a model: other communities can learn from Batana not the specific content (their maritime traditions are unique) but the governance approach.
Kumrovec: artisans as educators
At Staro Selo Kumrovec, the involvement of local artisans goes beyond performance. Weavers, blacksmiths, and potters participate in the museum not as employees demonstrating skills to visitors but as educators with knowledge to transmit. The museum provides the infrastructure and the audience; the artisans provide the expertise and the authority.
The interactive workshop model at Kumrovec is designed around a specific pedagogical conviction: heritage is best transmitted through doing, not observing. Visitors and community participants do not watch a weaver; they sit at a loom. They do not observe bread-making; they knead the dough. This hands-on approach serves two functions simultaneously. For visitors, it creates an authentic, memorable experience. For the community, it creates regular occasions for practicing and therefore maintaining the skill.
The CRAFTATTRACT project extended this logic into economic development, connecting local craft practitioners with international markets and institutional partners (Forum of Slavic Cultures, Croatia Nostra). Artisans whose work had been economically marginal found new markets. Their knowledge became an economic asset recognized beyond the region.
ACTIVITIES
Activity 1 – Design a Participatory Mapping Exercise (Individual or Pairs | 20 min)
You have been asked to help a community in your region identify its intangible heritage before a new tourism development project begins.
Design a participatory mapping session: Who would you invite? What question would you ask them? How would you collect information (interview, group discussion, walk-through of the neighborhood, drawing exercise)? What would the final map look like?
Write a brief facilitation plan (150 words) and sketch the categories your map would use.
Activity 2 – Narrative Audit (Group | 20 min)
Choose any heritage tourism website, brochure, or exhibition text (it can be the Batana Eco-Museum website, Kumrovec’s page, or a site from your own country).
Conduct a narrative audit:
- Whose voices are present? Whose are absent?
- What is described as heritage? What is left out?
- What language is used – who is the implied audience?
- Is the community shown as active agent or passive subject?
Present your findings to the class and propose two specific changes that would make the narrative more community-centered.
Activity 3 – Community Involvement Proposal (Group | 20 min)
A local municipality asks your group to advise on a new heritage tourism initiative around a traditional craft (you choose the craft and region).
Draft a short proposal (200 words) that answers: How will the community be involved in governance, not just programming? How will intergenerational transmission be built into the initiative? How will revenue be shared? What happens if the community wants to withdraw or change the initiative in five years?
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
- Why should communities lead in heritage interpretation rather than professional curators, tourism boards, or governments?
- What risks arise when heritage is curated only for tourists – even when curated well and respectfully?
- Is there a difference between a community that chooses to perform its heritage for tourists and a community that is required to perform it? Does consent change the meaning of staged authenticity?
- At Batana, the community both preserves the tradition and profits from its tourism. At Kumrovec, artisans become educators and economic actors. Do you see any tensions in these arrangements? What safeguards would you put in place?
- Can an outside researcher, museum professional, or tourism developer ever be a genuine partner in community-led heritage – or are they always, to some degree, imposing an external agenda?
- Think of a heritage practice in your own community that is currently not recognized or promoted. What would a genuine community-led process for bringing it into public view look like?