Reclaiming Community Agency in Managing Intangible Cultural Heritage: Paperwork, People, and the Potential of the Public Voice

This chapter examines how the centrality of community agency has been addressed in main statutory and relevant extra-statutory documents of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), paying attention as well to on-topic debates in the process of the adoption of these documents. It also traces different understandings of community and its agency in the discussions on international inscriptions of ICH elements, notably in cases of the Intergovernmental Committee’s overturn of unfavorable recommendations of the Evaluation Body. A promising and attainable way out from a paperwork treatment of ICH would be to open the Convention to so-called correspondence from the public, i.e., to devise an inclusive mechanism that would allow, or even encourage, bearers of ICH and their communities, various other stakeholders, and public society at large to take part in (text-based) debates on safeguarding ICH under the 2003 Convention, especially as regards monitoring of elements included in the lists, registers, and inventories at national and international levels. It could be effectuated through the establishment of an ICH NGO monitoring center that would integrate expertise in ICH and dedication to the principle of community agency.