Cultural Development Zones

The international heritage framework, the Faro Convention, the World Heritage Convention, the Cultural Expressions Convention, and the Culture|2030 Indicators, has, with increasing precision over five decades, recognized heritage communities as right-holders, protected the physical sites that hold their work, defended the policy space within which their cultural practice operates, and measured the contribution of culture to sustainable development. The framework converges, instrument by instrument, at a single threshold each instrument explicitly declines to cross: the institutional level at which heritage communities exercise their stewardship.

This book argues that the convergence is structural, and that the architectural form heritage communities require to retain authorship of their own cultural practice across institutional pressure can be drafted into the constituting documents of community-based heritage organizations across legal systems. Cultural Development Zones, the form the book specifies, integrates seven constitutional-choice principles, derived from cross-case adjudication of seven rival hypotheses against five international cases distributed across four legal systems. The book draws on Ostrom's commons-governance tradition and on Wolterstorff's account of inherent rights and justice-as-shalom, and proposes a UNESCO Recommendation on Heritage Community Governance as the multilateral instrument best suited to the post-MONDIACULT 2025 policy moment.