From authoritative discourse to community empowerment: The reconceptualization of "local communities" in global heritage governance

In an era when globalization recedes and local identity returns in parallel, cultural heritage is no longer a frozen past, but a strategic resource for urban competition, social cohesion, and climate resilience. Yet, as international organizations frequently call for "community participation," a fundamental question remains unresolved: whose "community" are we actually talking about? A new study published in npj Heritage Science employs natural language processing (NLP) techniques to conduct text mining on the authoritative documents of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), for the first time systematically mapping the cognitive landscape of the concept of "local community" in international heritage discourse. Its conclusion—a "three-level, four-family" keyword system—is not merely an academic conceptual clarification but also micro-evidence of a paradigm shift in global urban governance.

Why has community become the "key variable" in heritage governance

Over the past two decades, the spatial logic of heritage protection has undergone a fundamental expansion. From individual monuments to historic neighborhoods, from tangible remains to living traditions, the Valletta Principles and the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, both issued in 2011, extended the protected objects to the entire historic environment. This expansion makes it difficult for any single expert system to cope, and communities have thus shifted from being appendages of protected objects to core actors that carry, interpret, and perpetuate heritage values. In 2007, the World Heritage Committee added "community" to the original 4C strategy, forming a "5C" framework; in 2022, ICOMOS's International Charter on Cultural Heritage Tourism even inserted "community resilience" directly into its subtitle. These events mark that international heritage governance has completed its transition from "protection of things" to "development of people."

However, this transition is accompanied by discursive ambiguity. In various ICOMOS documents, "local community" sometimes refers to geographically adjacent residents, sometimes equates to groups sharing cultural identity, and even occasionally is confused with international expert networks. This vagueness is not a textual flaw, but rather reflects the deep ambivalence of authoritative institutions toward the role of communities—they need communities as a source of legitimacy, yet find it hard to relinquish the monopoly of expert knowledge over value determination.

One Study, Four Faces: How NLP Reconstructs the Community Landscape

Using computational methods such as word frequency calculation, LDA topic modeling, and hierarchical clustering, the study systematically reviews ICOMOS's authoritative documents. It finds that community descriptions scattered across different documents can be grouped into four keyword families: tourism, management-development, tradition-knowledge, and socio-economics. These four families are not in a parallel relationship, but rather constitute a "three-level, four-family" system with a hierarchical structure.

At the first level is the "tourism" family, which has the strongest association with "local community." This is not surprising—heritage tourism is the primary interface through which communities establish direct economic ties with heritage, and international cultural tourism has always been a core topic of concern for ICOMOS. But this also implies a risk: when communities are primarily seen as providers of tourism services, their subjectivity may yield to the logic of consumerism.The second tier is the "management-development" family, which defines the basic principles and operational pathways for community participation. The emergence of this tier indicates that ICOMOS has shifted from abstract humanitarian concern to concrete capacity-building and governance mechanisms. Communities are no longer merely objects to be empowered, but are incorporated into the roles of managers and development partners.

The third tier contains two families: "tradition-knowledge" and "social-economic." The former defines communities as bearers of traditional knowledge and living skills, while the latter emphasizes the contribution of community participation to poverty reduction, employment, and social equity. Together, these constitute the dual dimensions of community value—serving as both vehicles of cultural memory and levers of social progress.

This "three-tier, four-family" system is not static but a product of historical evolution. Research shows that different keyword families emerged in different periods, and their developmental trajectories exhibited a pattern of waxing and waning. This suggests that ICOMOS's understanding of community was not achieved all at once, but was gradually pieced together through interaction with the external environment (such as tourism expansion and the global sustainable development agenda).

From Expert Monologue to Social Negotiation: A Mirror of Global Urban Governance

If this finding is placed within a broader urban strategic context, its significance extends beyond heritage conservation itself. Currently, cities in the Global South are experiencing unprecedented rapid urbanization, and conflicts between the conservation of historic districts and community livelihoods are becoming increasingly acute. Under the traditional model, conservation planning was often formulated by external experts, and community residents were forced to accept it; the new ICOMOS discourse, however, implies that communities should be the subjects of planning, with their opinions even holding authority higher than that of experts. This in fact epitomizes the global shift in urban governance from a "government-capital" binary game toward a "government-capital-community" triangular negotiation.

In regions such as Southeast Asia and Latin America, practices promoting the participation of "local communities" in heritage decision-making have often simultaneously transformed land property rights, tourism revenue distribution, and public space governance structures. Although these cases are not the direct objects of this study, the research framework provides a discursive coordinate for understanding these urban experiments. When international organizations set "community resilience" as a goal of heritage policy, they in effect recognize communities as basic units for addressing socio-ecological challenges, echoing the global climate agenda and the resilient cities movement.

Community Rhetoric for the Future: Who Defines the "Local"?

This article's other value lies in its methodological demonstration. Traditional heritage research has largely relied on qualitative interpretation, whereas this study uses computational text analysis to reveal the underlying structure of authoritative discourse, bringing to the surface the repeated yet unspoken assumptions in policy texts. This capacity for "discourse mining" will increasingly become a foundational tool for global governance research.However, we must also be wary of another danger: the quantification of discourse does not automatically lead to the equalization of power. When "community" is incorporated into the managerial ideology of international organizations, it may be instrumentalized as a means to improve project efficiency rather than genuinely endowing residents with self-governance. As critical heritage studies have warned, authoritative heritage discourse often perpetuates its dominance by absorbing the concept of community. Therefore, the empowerment of "local communities" should not remain at the level of added text or keyword density, but must be realized through substantive transfers of legal rights, financial resources, and decision-making seats.

For global cities, this research points to a clear strategic judgment: future urban competitiveness will increasingly depend on the capacity to accommodate diverse voices. A city's heritage—whether tangible or intangible—as an irreplicable accumulation of civilization, can only be transformed into sustainable resilience and innovative power in an environment where communities are deeply engaged. Cities that are the first to embed "community sovereignty" into their governance structures will possess a genuine comparative advantage in the next civilizational cycle.

From ICOMOS texts to urban practice, from keyword families to governance philosophy, we are witnessing a global cognitive revolution: the community is not an object to be managed, but the fundamental force that defines what heritage, what livability, and what the future are. And the first page of this revolution begins precisely with re-reading every "community" in authoritative discourse.