A Critical Review of the Function of Intangible Cultural Heritage as a Driver for Social Resilience and Cohesion

Abstract

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is increasingly recognised as a potential factor that can strengthen social cohesion and societal resilience. Yet, existing scholarship often valorises ICH without fully examining the challenges, exclusions, and political tensions it can produce. This article addresses that gap by critically reviewing UNESCO frameworks, case studies, and academic literature to evaluate both the opportunities and the limitations of ICH in contemporary societies. Our analysis highlights how ICH can contribute to shared identity, intergenerational transmission, and adaptive ecological knowledge, while also noting the risks of standardisation, misappropriation, and nationalistic appropriation. Using a comparative and critical literature review approach, we synthesise examples from diverse contexts to illustrate the dual role of ICH as both a community resource and a contested political tool. The findings do not suggest that ICH universally or inevitably generates resilience or cohesion. Rather, they map the paradigms in which ICH has been mobilised for these purposes, showing both the potential benefits and the risks. On this basis, the article offers policy recommendations that emphasise community-led safeguarding, integration of traditional knowledge into resilience frameworks, and vigilance against exclusionary or exploitative uses of ICH.

1. Introduction

The concept of cultural heritage has evolved significantly in recent decades, moving beyond tangible monuments and artefacts to embrace the living expressions that define communities worldwide [1]. This shift, largely influenced by instruments like UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the ICH, acknowledges heritage as a ‘living, breathing element of human existence’ [2]. This work regards contributions of ICH to the strengthening of social bonds and the enhancement of adaptive capacities within societies. Understanding these mechanisms is central for policymakers, researchers, and community leaders seeking sustainable pathways to collective well-being and stability in an increasingly complex world. ICH is a fundamental resource for human development and societal flourishing [3].

This article specifies when and how ICH can contribute to social cohesion and societal resilience. We (i) define mechanisms through which ICH operates, (ii) identify the conditions under which these mechanisms translate into absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities, and (iii) derive policy levers and indicators aligned to those mechanisms. The contribution is a mechanism-led synthesis that integrates opportunities and risks, rather than a claim of universal effects. Methods are a critical review of UNESCO frameworks, peer-reviewed literature and documented programmes, sampled for relevance and diversity (2003–2025).

This study is based on a critical literature review and analysis of international reports, UNESCO declarations, and case studies that link ICH to resilience and social cohesion. The corpus was constituted from three main sources: (i) official UNESCO conventions, handbooks, and policy documents published between 2003 and 2025, (ii) peer-reviewed academic literature in heritage, anthropology, and resilience studies, and (iii) selected case studies documented by international organisations (UNDP, ICCROM, World Bank) and national initiatives. Selection criteria prioritised (1) the relevance of sources in connecting ICH with resilience, social cohesion, or adaptation, (2) their diversity in the inclusion of cases across regions, governance contexts, and cultural domains, and (3) their recency, preferring materials published within the last 20 years, while including seminal older works for conceptual foundations. The analysis was conducted manually by the authors, not by automated data mining. A thematic coding approach was applied to identify recurring patterns (e.g., identity formation, transmission, ecological knowledge, crisis response) as well as tensions (e.g., misappropriation, politicisation, exclusion through UNESCO listing).

Existing scholarship on ICH has demonstrated its importance for cultural identity, sustainable development, and the safeguarding of diversity [3,4,5]. More recent work has highlighted the intersections of ICH with climate change [2], education [6,7], and peacebuilding [8]. However, much of this literature either valorises ICH as an unqualified good or treats it in narrowly sectoral terms. What remains underexplored is a critical synthesis that examines both the positive contributions of ICH to resilience and cohesion and the tensions, exclusions, and political dynamics that accompany its recognition, transmission, and use. This article addresses that gap by situating ICH within the dual framework of social cohesion and societal resilience, while also engaging with critiques concerning standardisation, misappropriation, and uneven access to safeguarding mechanisms. In doing so, it contributes to heritage studies by offering a balanced, policy-oriented review that integrates opportunities and risks, aiming to guide future safeguarding strategies.

It should be noted that this article does not attempt to prove that ICH is an infallible or universal solution for resilience and cohesion. Instead, its contribution lies in examining the paradigms and mechanisms through which ICH has been utilised as a resource for these purposes. The approach is therefore exploratory and synthetic, mapping conceptual frameworks and case evidence rather than demonstrating causality.

The contribution of this paper is to synthesise existing paradigms, stemming from engineering, socio-ecological, and evolutionary resilience domains, and to locate ICH within them. This provides a foundation for more targeted empirical research rather than claiming infallible outcomes.

2. Foundations

The link between living heritage and societal strength is based upon the following conceptual foundations.

2.1. A Dynamic Definition

ICH is generally recognised as the wealth of cultural traditions and practices that communities acknowledge as integral to their cultural identity. As defined by UNESCO, ICH encompasses the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills, as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts, and cultural spaces associated therewith, that communities, groups, and, in some cases, individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage [1,9].

An aspect of ICH is its non-static nature. It is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature, and their history. This inherent adaptability is critical for its ongoing relevance and utility in a rapidly changing world. The communities themselves link the vitality and authenticity of ICH intrinsically to its recognition and practice. These communities are the primary bearers and transmitters of this heritage, and their involvement is paramount for its safeguarding. Furthermore, ICH is fundamentally transmitted through generations, through informal education, imitation, and immersion in practice. This process is essential for its continuity and sustained relevance within a community. The importance of ICH lies in its cultural manifestation and extends to communities and the wealth of knowledge and skills it transmits [6,9].

UNESCO’s 2003 Convention [1] identifies five broad domains where ICH is manifested: oral traditions and expressions (including language as a vehicle); performing arts (such as traditional music, dance, and theatre); social practices, rituals, and festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and traditional craftsmanship. The consistent portrayal of ICH as dynamic and constantly recreated, alongside its role in providing identity and continuity, has led some to model it via an ‘operating system’ metaphor for community coordination; we adopt this strictly as a heuristic, with context-dependent applicability. This system affirms a community’s sense of self and its historical trajectory, making it relevant and adaptable to changing environments, rather than a collection of old customs to be preserved. This shifts the focus from preservation of individual elements to nurturing cultural transmission and adaptation, which have profound implications for safeguarding strategies and the integration of ICH into broader societal development [4,9].

2.2. ICH as an Analytic Metaphor: The ‘Cultural Operating System’

We use UNESCO’s term ‘cultural operating system’ as an analytic metaphor, which is useful for describing coordination, norms, and adaptive scripts, but not as a literal systemic theory. Its value lies in illuminating how practices structure sense-making and action; its limits include risks of reification and instrumentalism. This systemic view is useful insofar as it highlights how, in some settings, cultural heritage can provide scaffolding for adaptation and evolution; its relevance and utility are contingent on institutional support and community agency (§2.5). Consequently, the focus shifts from the static preservation of individual elements to nurturing the processes of cultural transmission and adaptation, which have profound implications for safeguarding strategies and the integration of ICH into broader societal development.

To situate this metaphor, we read ICH through three lenses. First, a governmentality perspective treats inventories, mappings and participation protocols as techniques that actively configure subjects and capacities rather than neutral descriptions [10,11]. Second, metacultural production draws attention to how heritage status is made (selection, display, and expert valuation) and how this reflexively reorganises practice [12,13]. Third, inscription and standardisation generate list-effects that redistribute recognition, induce comparability, and can create new hierarchies across diverse practices [14]. In this sense, ‘cultural operating system’ is a heuristic for coordination and adaptation under specific institutional conditions, not an ontological claim about culture-as-software. Throughout, we treat the metaphor as contingent and situated: a heuristic that can clarify coordination and adaptation under specific institutional conditions but can also obscure power, participation and hierarchy; the following sections make explicit the limitations.

The consistent emphasis on ICH’s dynamic nature and its capacity to be constantly recreated elevates its understanding from a mere characteristic to a fundamental functional role. Treating ICH as an operating-system metaphor implies an underlying repertoire that can help a community process information, make decisions, and respond to its environment; the reach of this repertoire varies by context. Accordingly, the condition of ICH may be related to a community’s adaptive capacity, but it is neither the only nor a sufficient determinant. This reframing invites viewing investments in ICH as potentially supporting social, cognitive, and adaptive capacities, particularly where communities retain decision-making power and resources. In such cases, ICH may be cross-cutting for sectors such as development, public health, and security, where enabling conditions are absent; this linkage weakens. The corollary is that the erosion of ICH can coincide with diminished cohesion or adaptive capacity, although these relationships are mediated by broader political and economic factors (§2.5).

While ICH, social cohesion, and societal resilience are defined as distinct concepts, their intricate interrelationship is repeatedly emphasised. ICH is presented as a driver of social cohesion, which in turn is a practical resource that enables a community to function, problem-solve, and thrive, contributing to resilience. Societal resilience, in its emphasis on ongoing learning, evolving, and even transforming, implies a community’s enhanced capacity to adapt and, by extension, to dynamically recreate and safeguard its ICH. This creates a mutually reinforcing cycle: strong ICH supports cohesion, which builds resilience, and a resilient community is better equipped to perpetuate and adapt its ICH, further strengthening its social fabric and adaptive capacities. This understanding implies that interventions targeting one aspect, such as safeguarding ICH, can have profound ripple effects across the others, suggesting that a holistic and integrated approach to community development is most effective. Conversely, the degradation or loss of ICH may initiate a negative cycle, potentially weakening social bonds, eroding collective efficacy, and diminishing a community’s adaptive capacity, rendering it more vulnerable to future shocks.

2.3. Social Cohesion

Social cohesion refers to the strength of relationships and the pervasive sense of solidarity among community members [15]. It is a multifaceted concept that involves building shared values and communities of interpretation, reducing disparities in wealth and income, and enabling people to sense that they are engaged in a common enterprise, facing shared challenges, and that they are members of the same community [16].

Key elements of social cohesion include a collective understanding of what is important, along with a strong, collective identity that binds individuals together. This creates a profound sense of mutual support, trust, and connectedness. A critical component is social capital, which refers to the collective resources available to a group through its social networks, including mutual trust and shared norms, which facilitate collective action. Furthermore, social cohesion encompasses collective efficacy, which is the community’s shared belief in its collective ability to create positive change and exercise informal social control, influencing behaviour through social norms [15].

While social cohesion is often discussed in terms of shared values and a common enterprise, its meaning lies in its connection to social capital and collective efficacy. This connection reveals that social cohesion is a practical resource for a community. It implies the presence of functional social networks, shared resources, and the collective capacity to act and influence behaviour [17]. This understanding transforms social cohesion from a passive sentiment into an asset that directly contributes to a community’s ability to function, problem-solve, and thrive. Consequently, interventions aimed at improving public health or reducing social problems should consider strengthening social cohesion as a scaffolding strategy, recognising its ripple effects on collective action and overall community well-being [18].

In this article, ICH is treated as practice-embedded cultural knowledge: repertoires of skills, narratives and rituals that organise perception and action. Social cohesion is used to denote relational capacity (trust, reciprocity and collective efficacy). Societal resilience refers to a population’s ability to absorb disturbance, adapt, and, where necessary, transform its structures. ICH enables cohesion by shared norms, identities and ritual affordances; cohesion, in turn, enables resilience by coordinating information flow, mutual aid and collective decision-making. However, these links are conditional: standardisation, gatekeeping and commodification may weaken cohesion, and institutional silos or power asymmetries may block the translation of cohesion into resilience [14]. The analyses that follow keep these distinctions explicit and specify when the links hold, and when they fail (§2.5; §§3–4).

2.4. Societal Resilience

Societal resilience is the capacity of communities to contain major disruptions and recover following the decline of their core functionalities [19]. It represents the ability to continue functioning effectively despite adversities, absorbing shocks, recuperating, and continuing on a trajectory of growth. Unlike national resilience, which often focuses on infrastructure, societal resilience emphasises the capacity of individuals and communities to function in the face of hardship [19].

Key attributes of societal resilience include adaptability and flexibility, which are the capacity to adjust to changing conditions and new realities [2]. It also involves resistance and absorption, the ability to withstand and absorb shocks caused by disasters, emergencies, and crises without suffering a significant and long-lasting decline. Furthermore, resilience encompasses recovery and transformation, the capacity to recuperate and, in some cases, transform in response to adversity, actively moving forward [19]. Lastly, preparedness, which involves proactive measures taken by communities and households to anticipate, mitigate, and effectively respond to the impact of potential emergencies, is a critical building block for societal resilience [19].

The definitions of societal resilience highlight the concept of bouncing back and forward and the ability to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover [20]. This nuanced language moves beyond a simplistic notion of returning to a pre-crisis state. The emphasis on flexibility and the capacity to adapt to changing conditions [19] implies that true societal resilience is an ongoing learning, evolving, and even transforming process in response to adversity. It suggests a proactive capacity for continuous adjustment and growth, rather than a passive recovery. The metaphor of ICH as a ‘cultural operating system’ [1,5] further reinforces this systemic view, highlighting that cultural heritage provides the scaffolding framework for continuous adaptation and evolution. Consequently, policies and interventions aimed at building resilience focus on post-disaster recovery, adaptive capacities, innovation, and sustainable development pathways that allow communities to emerge stronger and better equipped for future challenges.

2.5. Complexities and Critiques of ICH

The analytic value of ICH for cohesion and resilience is conditional. This section organises well-established critiques into three lenses: power/governmentality, participation dilemmas, and commodification/hierarchy. The purpose is to indicate when links from ICH to cohesion, and from cohesion to resilience, are likely to hold or fail (§§3–4).

2.5.1. Heritage, Power, and Governmentality

From a governmentality perspective, inventories, mappings and safeguarding plans are not neutral descriptions but techniques that shape subjects, priorities and capacities. Participation, monitoring and indicators can operate as forms of governing-at-a-distance, aligning community effort with external policy agendas [10,11,21]. Metacultural production further shows that ‘heritage’ status is made, and this making reorganises practice, authority and value [12,13]. Listing and standardisation create comparability and visibility but can also channel resources towards what is demonstrable, auditable and touristic [14]. In short, infrastructures of recognition are also infrastructures of power.

In recessionary Japan, community-mapping ‘treasure hunts’ enrolled rural residents to catalogue local attributes. Visibility and ‘self-propelled’ stewardship rose, but responsibility for sustaining services devolved to residents as central subsidies withdrew; this is an instance of governing-at-a-distance through inventories [10].

2.5.2. Participation: Dilemmas and the ‘Tyranny’ Risk

Participation is necessary but not sufficient. Who speaks for whom, under what procedures and with what decision rights, determines whether ‘inclusion’ expands capability or merely legitimises pre-set plans [22,23]. Consent can be procedural rather than substantive; meetings and forms privilege the already-resourced; ‘representativeness’ can disguise gatekeeping. The result is a rhetoric of empowerment without corresponding control over resources, timing or evaluation. Where participation is performative, cohesion is surface-level and rarely translates into resilience capacities.

In the UNESCO debate on Peru’s Eshuva ritual chanting, a symbolic ‘arrow’ from Santa Rosa de Huacaria was cited as consent, and urgency rhetoric (‘bearers may disappear’) helped overturn the evaluators’ technical objections. Consent was satisfied procedurally while decisions remained in diplomatic hands, illustrating how participation can legitimise pre-set outcomes [22].

2.5.3. Commodification, Appropriation, and Hierarchy Effects

Market and branding logics can lift some practices while marginalising others. Listings and labels generate ‘list-effects’: they rank, standardise and stabilise fluid practices, which may increase recognisability while narrowing variation [14]. Performances adapted for visitors often compress tempo and complexity, privileging spectacle over transmission. Circulation without governance risks appropriation; benefits pool with intermediaries rather than bearers. Under these conditions, ICH may still coordinate action, but the resulting cohesion is excluded, and the pathway to resilience is weakened.

In Brussels, the ‘Fry-hut Festival’ and the candidature of fry-hut culture reframed everyday practice as inventory-worthy through external validation. Rankings and spectacle boosted recognisability, yet the codified format privileged performable versions over ordinary transmission; this is an example of list-induced hierarchy and commodification [14].

Taken together, these lenses specify boundary conditions. ICH enables cohesion and resilience when recognition systems distribute authority, participation confers real decision power, and market interfaces preserve transmission. Where infrastructures of power, participation and commodification misalign, the links attenuate or reverse. Below, the identified risk types are enumerated as follows. R1. Gatekeeping/absent decision rights; R2. External intermediary capture; R3. Standardisation and list-induced hierarchies; R4. Festivalisation/commodification (incl. place-branding, showcase displacement); R5. Metrics bias/audit dominance (indicator performativity); R6. Appropriation/benefit leakage, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) co-optation. The analyses in §§3–4 use this frame to interpret cases and failure modes.

2.6. Key Implementation Resources and Networks

• UNDP’s Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) Culture Sector Guidance [24] integrates intangible heritage into formal recovery planning.
• The UNESCO ICH ‘Sustainable Development and Living Heritage’ toolkit and case study compendium [25] offers links between ICH and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• ICCROM ‘First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis’ handbook and toolkit [26] includes operational protocols for emergencies.
• World Bank and UNESCO ‘Culture in City Reconstruction and Recovery‘ (CURE) Position Paper and Technical Notes [8]. Strategy for integrating culture into post-conflict and post-disaster reconstruction.
• 2025 Horizon Europe calls ‘Innovative ICH for Societal Resilience’ [27] for funding participatory, youth-focused, adaptive-knowledge projects, including digital innovation.

3. ICH as a Driver of Social Cohesion

ICH profoundly enhances social cohesion through shared identity, strengthening social bonds, promoting mutual respect, and ensuring intergenerational continuity within communities [28].

We treat the link from ICH to social cohesion as a set of mechanisms rather than a uniform effect. Practices structure co-presence (regular gatherings), synchrony (shared tempo/gesture), and role scripts (who does what, when), which lower coordination costs and support mutual recognition. Shared narratives and repertoires provide common reference points that simplify decision-making and reduce conflict in ordinary life. At the same time, repertoires draw boundaries: they signal who belongs, which variants are legitimate, and which voices count in allocating resources. Where repertoires are plural and governance is inclusive, boundary-drawing can be bridging (connecting groups); where they are standardised or gatekept, it becomes bonding that excludes. In short, ICH can enable cohesion by organising attention, effort and trust, but the outcome depends on how recognition, decision rights and benefits are distributed (§2.5; see also §4).

3.1. Shared Identity and Belonging

ICH can provide a powerful and enduring sense of collective identity and unity among its members, defining ‘who we are’ as a community. This shared identity is a fundamental source of strength, particularly when communities face internal or external adversity [5].

The practices, knowledge, and expressions transmitted across generations create a common narrative, a shared understanding of a community’s history, values, and place in the world. This collective heritage encourages a sense of identity and responsibility, helps individuals feel intrinsically part of one or more communities and, by extension, society. For instance, the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, recognised as ICH, embodies a spirit of harmony, respect, and tranquillity, reinforcing a collective cultural ethos that binds its practitioners. This collective identity, rooted in ICH, is a prerequisite for effective collective action, mutual support, and coordinated responses during times of challenge. It transforms a shared feeling into a tangible capacity for group agency and resilience.

The consistent description of ICH provides a sense of identity and belonging [1] implies a psychological benefit. Knowing ‘who we are’ and ‘where we come from’ offers a sense of continuity and stability [29]. In an era marked by rapid change, globalisation, and uncertainty, ICH provides a stable anchor. It offers a narrative framework that helps individuals and communities understand their place in the world, giving purpose and meaning, which is central to psychological well-being and a sense of security. This position safeguards ICH not just as preserving old practices, but as nurturing the psychological foundations of communities, providing stability and meaning in a turbulent world [4]. This can be particularly significant for marginalised or displaced communities seeking to maintain their cultural integrity.

3.2. Social Bonds and Networks

Participation in cultural activities, rituals, and festive events can strengthen social bonds and networks. These reinforced connections are central for collective action and mutual support within a community, especially during times of need [30].

Social practices, rituals, and festive events, as identified domains of ICH, serve to structure community life and play a key role in strengthening the social fabric inclusively [1,5,31]. These shared experiences cultivate positive social connections and feelings of belonging among participants [32]. For example, annual festivals and celebrations in many cultures function as powerful means of social bonding, reinforcing community ties and promoting overall social cohesion. The repeated collective enactment of rituals, beyond social interaction, serves to embed social order, making it more robust and predictable. This structured reinforcement of collective values is significant during periods of disruption or uncertainty, providing a stable framework for collective behaviour.

The strengthening of social bonds through ICH activities is about pleasant interactions and about building a tangible collective resource that can be used for collective benefit, problem-solving, and mutual support in times of need [17]. The explicit link between participation in cultural activities and the strengthening of social bonds and networks demonstrates how ICH practices provide structured opportunities for interaction, shared experiences, and collective endeavours [29]. These are the mechanisms by which social capital (trust, reciprocity, shared norms) is generated and reinforced. This transforms informal connections into actionable resources, making the community more effective in addressing challenges. Consequently, investing in and promoting ICH practices is a cultural expenditure and investment in a community’s social resources, yielding dividends in terms of trust, cooperation, and collective problem-solving capacity that are essential for addressing a wide range of societal challenges.

3.3. Intercultural Dialogue and Mutual Respect

An understanding and appreciation of the ICH of different communities is central to constructive intercultural dialogue and encouraging profound mutual respect for diverse ways of life.

In an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, ICH can play a role in maintaining and celebrating cultural diversity. By providing a platform for different communities to share their unique cultural practices and traditions, it promotes mutual understanding and respect among them. This cross-cultural understanding is an academic exercise essential for building inclusive societies, bridging divides, and preventing potential conflicts arising from cultural misunderstandings or intolerance. The consistent emphasis on ICH promoting cultural diversity and facilitating intercultural dialogue suggests that in societies characterised by increasing migration and diverse cultural groups, understanding and valuing each other’s living heritage moves beyond mere tolerance. It provides a concrete, shared space for interaction and appreciation, which can mitigate potential tensions, build empathy, and create an inclusive social environment. ICH is a cultural bridge, enabling different groups to find common ground and build a shared future, thereby directly contributing to social cohesion in complex, multicultural contexts [28].

Furthermore, if ICH effectively supports mutual understanding and respect, and if a lack of understanding or cultural insensitivity can fuel conflict, then promoting ICH-based dialogue becomes a proactive and preventative strategy for peacebuilding. The explicit statement that culture contributes to conflict prevention [33] suggests that investing in intercultural ICH programmes is a cultural amenity and a peacebuilding tool that addresses underlying social tensions before they escalate. This also highlights ICH’s role as a counterbalance to the homogenising forces of globalisation. By providing a rooted sense of identity and continuity, ICH resists the erosion of distinct cultural identities caused by globalising influences. It provides a means for communities to assert their unique expressions and values, preventing a monolithic global culture and ensuring that the world retains a rich tapestry of human expression. It furthermore encourages innovation and diverse ways of knowing and being, for addressing complex global challenges from multiple perspectives.

3.4. Intergenerational Transmission and Continuity

The transmission of ICH is widely regarded as fundamental to its existence, cultural continuity, and social ties. This intergenerational transmission is a dynamic form of informal education [6], where invaluable knowledge, practical skills, and values are passed on through imitation, direct immersion, and lived experience. This transmission builds students’ self-esteem, instils pride, and reinforces a strong sense of belonging to their local community, while simultaneously underscoring the intrinsic value of cultural diversity [6]. However, challenges such as generational gaps, changing lifestyles, and urbanisation threaten this transmission, making targeted institutional support and innovative safeguarding approaches critically important [34].

The description of transmission as an interactive process where ICH is constantly recreated and evolved in response to its environment illustrates that the act of transmission is a means to an end, and that the very mechanism by which ICH remains ‘living’ and thus capable of conferring its benefits. This implies a feedback loop: new generations appropriate and adapt the heritage, ensuring its relevance and viability, which in turn reinforces their identity and pride, motivating further transmission. Without robust and continuous transmission, ICH ceases to be a force and risks becoming mere cultural history, losing its capacity to shape community life.

This understanding underscores the strategic importance of education as a safeguarding and cohesion tool. Explicitly links intergenerational transmission to informal education and calls for integrating ICH into education programmes. It states that this integration can help educators to reach students in vulnerable or marginalised populations and help students to build social resilience in the face of adversity and establish bridges of dialogue to build more just, inclusive, diverse, and peaceful societies [6]. This suggests that formal and non-formal education systems are venues for teaching about ICH, and additionally, partners in its safeguarding. Through pride, belonging, and dialogue among youth, education becomes a direct contributor to social cohesion and resilience, ensuring that ICH’s benefits are perpetuated [28]. Consequently, safeguarding efforts must prioritise environments where intergenerational transmission can thrive organically, rather than solely focusing on documentation. This includes supporting informal learning spaces, mentorship, and adapting traditional practices to contemporary contexts to support their continued relevance and appeal to younger generations.

3.5. Illustrative Cases

Two brief cases illustrate how mechanisms translate into outcomes and where risks appear.

Aubusson [35] Weekly co-making sessions at the municipal cultural centre (Cité internationale de la tapisserie) engaged the public in the realisation of large woven works (‘aventures tissées’) alongside school-age and intergenerational ateliers. Routines of co-presence, shared tempo and role scripts deepened ties across artisan, youth and newcomer groups, culminating in a small municipal exhibition. Risks remained: coordination concentrated on a single organiser and cultural taxation on key bearers; without shared decision rights and stipends, benefits were uneven (§2.5) [35].

Southeastern Anatolia, Türkiye (2011 field study, published in American Antiquity). Ethnoarchaeological work on tandır bread ovens documents neighbourhoods where households rely on shared, outdoor ovens rather than private ones. These ovens function as hubs of social networking and gendered cooperation, concentrating information exchange and routine mutual aid among women; in some towns, multiple families share a single oven, coordinating schedules and labour. The shared practice supports everyday cohesion, but the same arrangements can entrench gatekeeping around access and timing (§2.5) [36].

In sum, ICH can enable social cohesion through co-presence, synchrony, role scripts and shared narratives; however, whether this cohesion is bridging or bonding depends on how recognition, decision rights and benefits are distributed, and on the power/market interfaces outlined in §2.5. Where enabling conditions hold, cohesion yields portable capacities: trust as a slack resource, routinised coordination, and a live index of who-can-do-what. Where conditions fail, performative unity can mask eroded transmission and unequal burdens. Cohesion should therefore be treated as a mediating variable, not an end-state. Section 4 examines how (and when) these mediating capacities translate into absorptive, adaptive and transformative resilience, as well as where translation breaks.

4. ICH as a Foundation for Societal Resilience

ICH can provide communities with the cultural resources, traditional knowledge, and robust social structures necessary to navigate disruptions, adapt to change, and recover effectively from adversity, thereby building enduring societal resilience.

4.1. A Model Linking ICH to Resilience

We treat resilience as a set of capacities: Absorptive (withstanding and recovering), Adaptive (adjusting routines and relations), and Transformative (reconfiguring structures), locating ICH’s contribution in the mechanisms that generate them.

4.1.1. Inputs

The inputs to this model are grouped into six types.

I1. Skills and techniques. Procedural know-how and craft routines that can be redeployed under constraint, providing low-tech redundancy when formal systems stall.

I2. Role scripts and apprenticeship routines. Shared expectations about who does what, when, and with whom, plus handover practices that maintain continuity, create redundancy in critical tasks, and speed task allocation.

I3. Shared narratives and symbolic resources. Stories, songs, emblems and ritual phrases that legitimise rapid mobilisation, encode obligations, and anchor meaning during stress.

I4. Calendrical rhythms and gathering infrastructures. Predictable events and the places or platforms that host them, which guarantee regular co-presence and reliable communication channels.

I5. TEK. Locally tuned insights about seasonality, micro-climates, siting, safe routes, resource cycles and substitution rules that inform quick, context-appropriate adjustments.

I6. Informal governance customs. Norms of reciprocity and mutual aid, lightweight rules for dispute resolution and rotating leadership, and recognised authority lines that allow communities to act without waiting for external permission.

4.1.2. Social Mechanisms

M1. Coordination: co-presence, synchrony and role scripts reduce transaction costs and speed task allocation (cf. §3).

M2. Information flow: shared idioms and gatherings route signals (needs, risks, resources) through trusted paths.

M3. Affect regulation: ritual/communal frames stabilise emotions under stress, sustaining collective efficacy.

M4. Material know-how: locally tuned techniques and TEK provide low-tech options when formal systems stall.

M5. Legitimacy: heritage meanings licence rapid mobilisation and mutual aid without lengthy negotiation.

4.1.3. Emerging Capacities

C1. Absorptive: rapid mutual aid; redundancy through overlapping roles; continuity of care/services.

C2. Adaptive: repertoire tweaks; temporary role reassignments; re-tasked spaces/tools; new partnerships.

C3. Transformative: rewriting rules (who decides, who benefits); new institutions seeded from practice.

4.1.4. Outcomes

Short-term: O1. Faster re-start of routines; O2. Documented exchanges; O3 Participation breadth.

Mid-term: O4. Diversified skills; O5. Cross-group projects; O6. Codified ‘who-can-do-what’ registers.

Long-term: O7. Governance changes; O8. Embedded mixed-method monitoring; O9. Reduced vulnerability to repeated shocks.

This model specifies when and how ICH can support resilience. Sections §2.5 and §3 identify the conditions under which links hold or fail; §§5–6 return to measurement and policy translation.

4.2. Boundary Conditions and Contradictions

The ICH pathway resilience is conditional. Repertoires that coordinate action can also exclude (gatekeeping); rituals that regulate affect can rigidify responses when flexibility is required; and TEK can be de-contextualised or co-opted when extracted into programme templates. These tensions explain why similar practices yield different results across settings. Where recognition systems distribute authority, participation confers decision rights, and transmission is resourced, ICH-linked cohesion can translate into absorptive and adaptive capacities. Where authority centralises, participation is performative, or market/logistical demands standardise repertoires, cohesion becomes bonding that excludes, and the pathway to resilience weakens. The identified boundary conditions are enumerated as follows. BC1. Decision rights devolved to bearers (authority, benefit-sharing rules); BC2. Resourced transmission (time, apprenticeship, multi-year support); BC3. Procurement/eligibility fit (micro-grants, fiscal hosts); BC4. Inclusive participation with bridging orientation and local legitimacy. Section 5 returns to cases that meet and fail these conditions; Section 6 discusses how policy design can avoid the failure modes identified here.

4.3. Institutional and Political Constraints on Integration

Integrating ICH into disaster risk reduction, public health, or urban resilience encounters predictable frictions. Mandate misfit separates cultural agencies from risk, health and infrastructure authorities, leaving no clear owner for cross-cutting work. Time-scale and budgeting mismatches privilege short project cycles over slow transmission, while metrics bias favours countable outputs (events, visitors) rather than capabilities (apprenticeship depth, repertoire flexibility). Representation dilemmas persist: who decides and who benefits when repertoires are ‘mobilised’? Programme procurement and eligibility rules often exclude informal groups that actually hold the know-how, and policy language translates practices into audit categories that strip context. These frictions explain why promising models travel unevenly: where decision rights and resources are co-owned with bearers, translation to absorptive/adaptive capacity is observable; where authority centralises or templates standardise practice, cohesion remains bonding and seldom becomes resilience (cf. §2.5; §3). Section 6 returns to how policy design can lower these barriers (mandates, funding, indicators, procurement).

4.4. Psychological and Emotional Coping Mechanisms

ICH offers essential narratives, rituals, and artistic expressions that provide profound psychological comfort, emotional outlets, and effective coping mechanisms during times of stress, uncertainty, and hardship. It can serve as a psychological and emotional resource for communities.

Human beings crave narratives that explain their place in the world and give purpose to their struggles. Myths, legends, and origin stories embedded in oral traditions provide powerful frameworks for understanding hardship and resilience, serving as reminders to communities of past challenges overcome and inspiring hope for the future. Traditional songs, music, dance, and rituals can be therapeutic and empowering, offering emotional release, a sense of continuity, and a means of self-expression. This psychological comfort and social cohesion derived from ICH act as buffers against anxiety and fragmentation during times of crisis [29,30]. This suggests that, in many contexts, investing in ICH can be viewed not merely as a cultural expenditure but as an investment in a community’s social and cognitive resources. It helps individuals and groups survive crises and treat trauma, find meaning in adversity, and maintain hope by connecting current struggles to a historical narrative of survival and adaptation. This meaning-making function is a direct contributor to psychological resilience, acting as a buffer against fragmentation, despair, and mental health decline during times of crisis.

The observation that engaging with ICH can be therapeutic and empowering and that it contributes to enhancing mental health and quality of life [32] implies that ICH is a significant, often overlooked, public health asset. Policies supporting ICH can contribute directly to community mental well-being, particularly in the aftermath of trauma or during ongoing stress, by providing culturally resonant avenues for emotional reflection, collective sharing, social support, and meaning-making.

4.5. TEK and Adaptive Skills

TEK and other practical skills embedded within ICH offer invaluable insights and practical solutions for adapting to environmental changes, managing resources sustainably, and ensuring resilient livelihoods [2].

TEK, defined as a cumulative body of knowledge, practices, and representations, describes the intricate relationships of living beings with their physical environment. This knowledge was culturally ingested, adapted, and transmitted through generations. Unlike typical Western reliance on standardised ‘scientific’ truths, TEK can accommodate local variations and reflects diverse belief systems, often providing more nuanced and locally appropriate approaches to resource management, food security, and water management. For example, traditional building techniques can inspire sustainable architectural designs, and centuries-old agricultural practices can inform organic farming, leading to less resource-demanding ways of living. This wisdom, refined over generations, is increasingly important for building ecological resilience in the face of contemporary challenges like climate change [2].

The consistent linkage of ICH to ‘knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe’ [1] and explicitly to TEK positions, ICH is an evolving repository of practical wisdom for sustainable living. It functions as a ‘living library’ that communities consult and adapt to address contemporary environmental and resource challenges [2]. This aspect allows for continuous learning and adaptation in response to new environmental pressures. Moreover, the observation that TEK can cope with variation from one location to another, reflecting a multitude of beliefs in different locations, contrasts with the typical Western reliance on a perception of objectivity [2], highlights a critical need for integrating indigenous and traditional knowledge systems, embedded in ICH, with modern scientific and policy approaches to climate change adaptation and sustainable development. Overlooking or devaluing this knowledge (as historical assimilation attempts have done [29]) represents a significant missed opportunity for developing more effective, holistic, and locally appropriate solutions that resonate with communities.

4.6. Collective Efficacy and Community Action

Shared cultural narratives and practices significantly contribute to collective efficacy, the shared belief in a group’s ability to achieve desired outcomes, unity, mutual trust, and coordinated responses during crises.

When communities engage in shared rituals, traditions, and histories, they reinforce their sense of unity and collective agency. This heightened collective efficacy translates directly into greater resilience when facing external threats or internal stresses. Many traditions inherently embody principles of cooperation, reciprocity, respect for nature, and intergenerational responsibility, which are reinforced through cultural practices. This leads to more effective collective behaviour in emergencies, as demonstrated by communities with strong traditions of cooperation and mutual support. The explicit link between social cohesion and collective efficacy [37] and the connection of ICH to this efficacy reveal a process [29]. ICH can create a feeling of togetherness and, in many contexts, has provided the shared understanding, established trust, and pre-existing networks that enable communities to effectively organise, make decisions, and act collectively in times of crisis. It serves as the practical bridge that translates social bonding into tangible, coordinated responses, making cohesion actionable.

The observation that collective efficacy is linked to informal social control and that ICH reinforces values like cooperation and reciprocity suggests that ICH, by embedding and reinforcing social norms, contributes to a self-regulating community. In a crisis, this informal social control can guide collective behaviour, support adherence to safety measures, and promote altruism, reducing chaos and enhancing the overall resilience response without relying solely on external authority. This implies that supporting ICH regards cultural safeguarding and is about investing in the practical, behavioural, and organisational capacities of communities to self-organise and respond to challenges. This makes ICH a critical component of any community development or disaster preparedness strategy.

4.7. Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Recovery

ICH can play a dual role in emergencies. While it can be directly threatened, it also effectively helps communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from various hazards, including natural disasters and conflicts.

Safeguarding ICH is indivisible from protecting the lives and well-being of its bearers. Communities, as the primary bearers, play a central role in identifying affected ICH, assessing needs, and utilising their heritage to enhance resilience. This involves integrating ICH into risk reduction and emergency preparedness efforts, using traditional knowledge for disaster risk management (DRM), and using cultural practices during recovery [37,38]. Examples include traditional construction skills for rebuilding after earthquakes, and festivals for community bonding for disaster risk management [39]. The dynamic nature of ICH allows it to adapt to changing situations, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, where communities adapted practices or shifted to online formats to maintain cultural continuity [40].

The explicit statement of ICH’s dual role in emergencies, as something to be protected and as a resource for preparedness, response, and recovery [1,9,40], suggests that ICH elements often function as an inherent, pre-existing social and knowledge within communities. This knowledge, comprising trusted social networks, shared knowledge systems, and established practices, can be mobilised more efficiently and culturally appropriately during emergencies than external, top-down interventions. This highlights ICH as a practical, embedded system for community survival and recovery. This implies a critical need for proactive safeguarding measures before crises [4]. Policies must address the erosion of ICH due to societal challenges like urbanisation and migration, as these weaken the very ‘cultural operating system’ [41,42] that communities rely on for resilience. Consequently, emergency management and humanitarian aid organisations should integrate ICH considerations into their strategies, identifying and using existing community-based cultural resources and knowledge systems to enhance local adaptive capacities and may enable more culturally appropriate and effective interventions [43].

4.8. Peacebuilding and Post-Conflict Reconciliation

In societies fractured by conflict, ICH can serve as a powerful tool for rebuilding social fabric, promoting dialogue, mutual understanding, and reconciliation.

ICH can provide a common ground for conflicting parties, allowing for shared reflection on collective memory and cultural identity. By engaging with living heritage, communities can promote mutual recognition, symbolic reparation, and forgiveness. This process contributes to the reintegration of former combatants into civilian life and the revitalisation of the social fabric. The protection and use of ICH can prevent its manipulation to fuel conflict [44]. The Colombia case study, where ICH was used as a basis for resilience, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in post-agreement contexts, exemplifies this. This initiative involved community-based inventorying and reflection on living heritage, collective memory, and cultural aspects of their territory, aiming to achieve mutual recognition and forgiveness among communities affected by decades of armed conflict [45].

In post-conflict settings, political and economic discussions can be highly contentious [6]. However, ICH represents shared cultural practices and memories, providing a common ground for conflicting parties [46]. This offers a non-threatening, culturally resonant entry point for dialogue and trust-building, bypassing immediate political sensitivities. This makes ICH a unique and powerful diplomatic and social tool. Furthermore, while post-conflict recovery often focuses on physical resources and economic rebuilding, ICH plays a central role in revitalising the social fabric and promoting new forms of coexistence [45]. This highlights that true recovery requires material reconstruction and the rebuilding of trust, relationships, and shared meaning. ICH addresses this socio-psychological dimension of peacebuilding, which is essential for long-term stability and preventing relapse into conflict. Therefore, peacebuilding initiatives should proactively integrate ICH strategies, moving beyond purely political or economic interventions. Recognising and supporting community-led ICH projects can be a powerful, bottom-up approach to rebuilding trust and social cohesion in fractured societies, contributing to long-term stability and preventing future conflicts.

4.9. Urban Resilience

Urban resilience is identified [31] as a policy response to climate change, disasters, and rapid urbanisation, with resilience brought in three ways: (i) Engineering resilience, which emphasises recovery and rapid return to equilibrium, (ii) Socio-ecological resilience, which highlights adaptability within thresholds, and (iii) Evolutionary resilience, which embraces transformation and unpredictability [16,24,31].

Most ICH applications relate to engineering resilience through the perspective of traditional craft conservation, revitalisation, or rehabilitation of built assets [42,47]. This perspective views ICH through an evolutionary perspective, where heritage becomes a driver of innovation and transformation in urban environments [31,48].

ICH in cities is closely tied to place attachment and identity, which become resources in disaster recovery. Local attachment to historic quarters and cultural practices underpins solidarity and meaning-making [49,50]. Evidence corroborated that ICH strengthens psychological resilience and supports collective mobilisation in urban crises. The Bam earthquake underscored that recovery depends on community and cultural values [48]. The Valparaíso case demonstrated that collective memory and rituals enable adaptation to climate-related hazards [50].

Urban resilience targets built structures that sustain rituals, festivals, and practices embedded within them. Conversely, urban development pressures weaken intangible dimensions, undermining cohesion and resilience [51,52]. The case of Valparaíso illustrates how socio-spatial change and speculative development threatened built and intangible heritage [52]. Effective resilience strategies require urban planning that treats tangible and intangible heritage as a single, interdependent system [53].

ICH-based regeneration is therefore most effective when communities define the terms of participation and benefit directly from outcomes. Participatory approaches highlight that practices provide frameworks for trust, dialogue, and inclusive regeneration [54,55]. Community cultural resources enable sustainable redevelopment as a by-product of maintaining cultural continuity [55]. Economic heritage dimensions, such as festivals, tourism, and creative industries, provide a twofold advantage: they revitalise neighbourhood communities and generate and displace risk and superficial commodification [56,57].

Part of the CHI’s role is to serve as educators, transmitting knowledge and values through exhibitions and increasingly using digital technologies [58,59]. Outdoor education initiatives link CH with curricula-enhanced awareness of resilience [60]. Such practices remain underdeveloped in urban policy frameworks, and expanding education around ICH can safeguard and reinterpret traditional practices for urban resilience.

Despite the documented relationship between ICH and urban resilience studies, they are dominated by built-heritage conservation. Some studies engage transformation, innovation, and future adaptation [47,48,61]. The lack of integration of ICH into broader urban resilience and climate policies is identified [62], and the absence of frameworks for measuring cultural resilience is underscored [63]. Addressing these gaps requires cross-sectoral approaches that link ICH safeguarding with urban planning, sustainability, and climate adaptation strategies [34,37]. The goal is to recognise ICH’s role as a foundation for urban transformation and convince policymakers of the need to develop future-oriented resilience strategies.

Taken together, the logic model (§4.1), boundary conditions (§4.2) and institutional constraints (§4.3) specify when ICH-linked cohesion translates into resilience capacities and when it does not. Under enabling conditions, namely distributed authority, decision rights for bearers, and resourced transmission, communities exhibit absorptive capacity (fast mutual aid), adaptive capacity (role reassignments and repertoire tweaks) and, at times, transformative shifts (rule changes and new institutions). Where authority centralises, participation is performative or repertoires are standardised for audit or market needs, cohesion tends to remain bonding and transmission erodes, weakening the pathway to resilience. Section 5 applies this model to cases; Section 6 derives policy levers and indicators that reduce the failure modes identified here.

5. Projects and Applications

This section organises projects into a comparative frame linked to the §4 logic model. Each case is read through a common lens spanning as follows: Context, ICH inputs, Mechanism(s), Capacity pathway, Outcome(s), Risks/Limits, Evidence level, so that examples are comparable rather than descriptive snapshots. ‘Evidence level’ flags the strength of support: A peer-reviewed evaluation; B documented programme results/reports; C descriptive accounts. We treat links as mechanistic (process-tracing) rather than universal causal claims (§§2.5, 4.1).

ICH provides communities with the cultural resources, traditional knowledge, and robust social structures necessary to navigate disruptions, adapt to change, and recover effectively from adversity, thereby building enduring societal resilience. The cases in this section are presented as illustrative examples of how ICH has been mobilised in different contexts; they demonstrate possible pathways and outcomes rather than universal or guaranteed effects.

5.1. Psychological and Emotional Coping Mechanisms

Traditional songs, music, dance, and rituals are inherently therapeutic and empowering. They offer an avenue for emotional release, continuity with the past, and a means of self-expression, all of which contribute to psychological well-being during stressful periods. In Japan, the cultural concept of ‘wa’ (harmony) is central to stress management [64]. This deeply ingrained cultural value encourages individuals to maintain harmonious relationships and avoid conflict. To uphold group harmony, individuals may practice emotional suppression and refrain from openly expressing stress. Additionally, engaging in mindfulness practices such as the traditional tea ceremony and Zen meditation helps individuals achieve inner peace and manage stress. The widespread tradition of taking a ‘siesta’ (afternoon nap) in Spain is a culturally accepted and effective stress coping mechanism. The ‘siesta culture’ emphasises rest and relaxation, allowing individuals to recharge and reduce stress levels during a midday break. This cultural acceptance of siestas also reflects a broader societal value on balancing work and leisure to maintain overall well-being. In India, traditional practices like yoga and Ayurveda play a significant role in stress management and holistic health. Yoga combines physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation to reduce stress and promote overall well-being. Ayurveda, an ancient system of medicine, focuses on maintaining balance in the body and mind through diet, herbal remedies, and lifestyle changes, contributing to holistic health.

The diverse examples from Japan, Spain, and India demonstrate that stress coping mechanisms are not universal but vary significantly across different cultures. Individualistic cultures, for instance, may prioritise self-reliance and seeking professional help, while collectivist cultures often emphasise social support and communal activities. This underscores the point that what works in one culture may not be appropriate or effective in another. This understanding emphasises that interventions aimed at psychological resilience must be culturally sensitive and inclusive. Rather than imposing external coping strategies, effective approaches should respect and use existing, culturally resonant coping mechanisms embedded within a community’s ICH. This highlights the importance of community-led approaches in designing and implementing mental health and well-being initiatives.

The ‘Smart Indigenous Youth’ in Saskatchewan, Canada, is a living example of ICH functioning as a pre-existing social resource, offering the ‘operating system’ of values, agency, and collective care that supports youth through contemporary crises. It is a five-year, community-led citizen-science initiative on land-based, culture-specific programmes focused on the Cree and Saulteaux language, ceremonial practices, storytelling, and harvesting medicines. Its embedding into high-school curricula is designed and delivered in partnership with local Elders, educators, and youth themselves. After a single four-month season, participants consistently reported improved self-esteem, mental wellness, intergenerational connection, and stronger cultural identity and belonging. These qualities are predictive of enhanced psychosocial resilience. For many participants, these results translated into reduced anxiety and renewed interest [65].

5.2. TEK and Adaptive Skills

In Vanuatu, traditional nakamal buildings are constructed with local materials and traditional skills, demonstrating significantly greater resilience to Tropical Cyclone Pam than structures built using modern materials and techniques [66]. This case illustrates the practical, adaptive value of traditional knowledge in disaster-prone regions. Centuries-old agricultural practices can inform modern organic farming methods, leading to less resource-demanding and more sustainable ways of living. Research by Karolina Dziubata-Smykowska explores the implications of declining snow resources, alterations in the vegetation cycle, and hydrological drought on traditional practices such as winter horse-drawn carriage racing and wickerwork in Poland [2]. This study aims to identify effective methods for safeguarding these traditions and harnessing this heritage into resilient action in response to climate change. The impact of warming seas on the centuries-old lamprey fishing tradition in Carnikava, Latvia, highlights how climate change directly affects biological species and, consequently, impacts cultural heritage, including craftsmanship, local knowledge, and food traditions, underscoring the need for sustainable solutions. Following an environmental disaster on the Greek Island of Samothráki, islanders reflected upon seemingly forgotten traditional knowledge to reframe their relationship with their environment. This demonstrates how ICH can provide a pathway for interpreting and responding to the climate crisis at a local level. The ‘art of dry-stone walling,’ inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the ICH of Humanity (UNESCO, 2018), offers significant ecological potential. These walls, built without mortar, create valuable habitats for plants and animals, thereby enhancing biodiversity on agricultural land. A growing awareness of this ecological potential is shaping the craft and the community of practice around it, particularly in Switzerland [2].

The Kallawaya, an ancient herbalist community from Bolivia renowned as the ‘doctors of the Inka,’ provides a powerful example of how traditional knowledge systems can offer critical solutions during systemic crises [67]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when conventional hospitals were overwhelmed and modern medicines inaccessible, Kallawaya healers utilised their vast pharmacopoeia of herbal remedies and traditional practices (such as the Andean concept of Ayni, or reciprocity, and the emphasis on a positive attitude) to treat symptoms and boost immunity. Their knowledge, gathered from diverse ecosystems, allowed them to adapt and respond effectively, providing essential healthcare and spreading hope when other systems failed. The Kallawaya cosmovision emphasises living in harmony with the environment, viewing illness due to spiritual dissonance caused by a disjuncture between a person and their environment [68].

The consistent linkage of ICH to ‘knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe’ and explicitly to TEK positions ICH as an evolving living library that communities consult and adapt to address contemporary environmental and resource challenges. The Polish and Latvian case studies vividly illustrate the direct impact of climate change on specific ICH practices, necessitating adaptive responses rooted in TEK [2]. This dynamic interaction highlights TEK’s capacity for continuous learning and adaptation in response to new environmental pressures. This underscores a critical need for the systematic integration of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems, embedded within ICH, with modern scientific and policy approaches to climate change adaptation and sustainable development. Overlooking or devaluing this knowledge, as historical assimilation attempts have performed, represents a significant missed opportunity for developing more effective, holistic, and locally appropriate solutions that genuinely resonate with and empower communities.

The Kallawaya example provides a compelling, real-world instance where a traditional medicine system, a component of ICH, became a primary healthcare provider during a modern global health crisis (COVID-19) when conventional healthcare systems were overwhelmed. This demonstrates the inherent resilience, adaptability, and practical utility of TEK, extending beyond environmental management to critical public health functions. The holistic approach of the Kallawaya, integrating community and environment through concepts like ‘Ayni’ (reciprocity), further contributes to this resilience. This implies that traditional healing systems, often marginalised or undervalued in modern policy, are critical components of a comprehensive public health strategy, particularly in vulnerable, remote, or crisis-affected communities. The safeguarding and support of such ICH can directly save lives, maintain community well-being, and provide culturally appropriate care during systemic shocks, highlighting the need for their recognition and integration into national health policies.

The case of the Uttarakhand ‘Mountain Wisdom’ and disaster preparedness at the Indian Himalayas demonstrates how traditional knowledge remains a readily deployable asset amid climate vulnerability and institutional gaps. In a multi-annual programme funded by UNDP and UNESCO, traditional ecological practices and folklore were systematically reintegrated into local hazard awareness campaigns. Rain-legends helped villages predict landslide risk zones, and storytelling festivals revived endemic water-management rituals. This ICH reintegration significantly increased community-led early warning, local ownership of disaster planning, and trust in neighbours, even where formal services were absent [69]

Selected examples of TEK practices that have been mobilised for environmental adaptation are summarised in Table 1, highlighting their potential outcomes in different ecological contexts. The following tables present illustrative examples of how ICH has been mobilised in relation to resilience and cohesion. They are not intended as exhaustive or universally applicable evidence, but rather as representative cases that demonstrate the diverse paradigms and contexts in which ICH has been utilised. Outcomes are therefore contingent on specific cultural, political, and ecological conditions.

Table 1. Examples of TEK that can contribute to Environmental Adaptation.

ICH Practice or TEK	Place	Challenge	Outcome	Reference
Traditional Building Techniques	Vanuatu	Tropical Cyclones	Increased structural resilience; effective post-disaster rebuilding	[70,71]
Organic Farming	Global	Resource Depletion, Climate Change	Less resource-demanding, sustainable living	[72,73,74]
Winter Horse-drawn Carriage Racing, Wickerwork	Poland	Declining Snow and Vegetation, Hydrological Drought	Safeguarding traditions, harnessing heritage for climate response	[2,75]
Lamprey Fishing Tradition	Latvia	Warming Seas (impact on species)	Sustainable fishing, cultural continuity amidst environmental change	[2,76,77,78,79,80]
Traditional Medicine	Bolivia/Andes	COVID-19 Pandemic, Systemic Crises	Providing essential healthcare, psychological comfort, and community well-being	[67,81,82]
Dry Stone Walling	Switzerland	Biodiversity Loss	Habitat creation, biodiversity enhancement in agricultural land	[2,83,84]
Environmental Reflection	Greek Island of Samothraki	Environmental Disasters	Reframing the human-environment relationship, interpreting the climate crisis	[2,85,86,87]

5.3. Collective Efficacy and Community Action

Shared cultural narratives and practices contribute significantly to collective efficacy, which is defined as the shared belief in a group’s ability to achieve desired outcomes, maintain unity, mutual trust, and coordinated responses during crises. When communities engage in shared rituals, traditions, and histories, they reinforce their sense of unity and collective agency. Many traditions inherently embody principles of cooperation, reciprocity, respect for nature, and intergenerational responsibility. These values are reinforced through cultural practices, leading to more effective collective behaviour in emergencies, as demonstrated by communities with strong traditions of cooperation and mutual support.

The case of Gullah-Geechee Heritage in Coastal USA illustrates how language, oral expression, and craft traditions embed place-based social capital that communities draw on in adversity [88]. Rural communities along the Carolinas and Georgia preserve the Gullah-Geechee language, song traditions, boat-building skills, and folk ecology. This practice serves as a cornerstone of community resistance to displacement, economic loss, and climate shocks, e.g., flooding, hurricanes. These traditions affirmed residents’ sense of rootedness, continuity, and, in some cases, legal claims to land. Importantly, intergenerational transmission of agricultural knowledge and proverbs functioned as informal social control and collective memory, enabling collective responses during recovery [88].

These communities inherently possess a heightened collective efficacy, which directly translates into greater resilience when confronting external threats or internal stresses. Their pre-existing social structures and norms of cooperation enable more effective collective action. ICH plays a role in creating a feeling of togetherness and providing the shared understanding, established trust, and pre-existing networks that empower communities to effectively organise, make decisions, and act collectively in times of crisis. This transforms social bonding into tangible, actionable responses.

The analysis explicitly connects social cohesion to collective efficacy and then links ICH to this efficacy, showing that ICH serves as the practical bridge that translates social bonding into tangible, coordinated responses, making cohesion actionable. This establishes a causal link: mere social ties, while important, are often insufficient for effective crisis response. ICH provides the shared norms, values, and trust that enable those ties to be mobilised and directed towards collective action, transforming latent social capital into agency. This suggests that supporting ICH is fundamentally about investing in the practical, behavioural, and organisational capacities of communities to self-organise and respond effectively to challenges. This makes ICH a critical and often overlooked component of any comprehensive community development or disaster preparedness strategy, highlighting its role in proactive and effective community-led solutions.

The observation that collective efficacy is linked to informal social control and that ICH reinforces values like cooperation and reciprocity suggests a deeper function of ICH. By embedding and reinforcing these social norms, ICH contributes to the development of a self-regulating community. In a crisis, this informal social control can guide collective behaviour, support adherence to safety measures, and promote altruism, thereby reducing chaos and enhancing the overall resilience response without relying solely on external authority. This highlights the profound societal benefit of ICH in intrinsic community governance and order. It suggests that communities with strong ICH are better equipped to manage internal dynamics and coordinate responses during emergencies, reducing the burden on external governmental or humanitarian structures. This makes ICH a valuable asset for sustainable local governance and effective crisis management from the ground up.

5.4. Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Recovery

ICH plays a dual role in emergencies. While it can be directly threatened by various hazards, it also effectively helps communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from these disruptions, including natural disasters and conflicts. Communities, as the primary bearers of ICH, play a central role in identifying affected heritage, assessing needs, and utilising their heritage to enhance resilience. This involves integrating ICH into risk reduction and emergency preparedness efforts, using traditional knowledge for DRM, and utilising cultural practices during the recovery phase.

Traditional building techniques and skills can be effectively used to rebuild infrastructure after disasters like earthquakes. The Vanuatu case study provides concrete evidence, showing that traditional nakamal buildings, constructed with local materials and traditional skills, were significantly more resilient to Tropical Cyclone Pam than those built with modern materials [66]. Festivals and other social practices reinforce community ties, which are crucial for coordinated action and mutual support during disasters. The dynamic nature of ICH was evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, where communities successfully adapted traditional practices or shifted to online formats to maintain cultural continuity and social connections despite physical distancing requirements.

UNESCO offers comprehensive support mechanisms for ICH safeguarding in emergencies. The ICH Fund provides technical and financial assistance for safeguarding activities in emergency contexts, such as calamities, natural disasters, armed conflicts, or epidemics [89]. The Convention’s Lists, particularly the List of ICH in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, can raise international awareness and mobilise cooperation for elements threatened by disasters or conflicts. UNESCO’s global capacity-building programme offers tailored support and dedicated training units on disaster risk reduction and safeguarding living heritage in conflict/forced displacement situations. Specific projects include: Colombia (2018–2020), utilising ICH as a basis for resilience, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in post-agreement contexts, involving community-based inventorying and reflection; Vanuatu (2015), safeguarding indigenous vernacular architecture and building knowledge; Niger (2018–2021), a pilot project focused on safeguarding ICH for the resilience of displaced populations and Cameroon (2021–2025), strengthening capacities for safeguarding ICH in situations of conflict and forced displacement.

The Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, while not exclusively focused on ICH, aims to protect cultural heritage threatened by disasters and help communities preserve their identities and history [90]. They engage in training for heritage stewards and emergency responders, staff stabilisation operations, research, and outreach. Their ‘First Aid to Cultural Heritage (FAC) Training’ programme aims to equip heritage caretakers with essential tools and techniques for cultural recovery in crisis-affected communities [90]. The Smithsonian’s broader ICH project specifically examines policies and practices that engage living cultural traditions, including performance, ritual, music, dance, knowledge, and storytelling.

Montenegro’s ‘Enhancing Trust and Resilience’ Programme helps re-weave trust across broken communal bonds and produces concrete, measurable social resilience dividends. Following social fragmentation in post-Yugoslav contexts, a UNESCO-UNDP collaboration worked with villages to document and practise intangible customs of communal music, craft cooperation, and rituals around shared seasons and pastures. These facilitated inter-ethnic dialogue, re-established rural cooperation over shared commons, and improved public trust in local institutions. As a result, villages with ICH networks demonstrated faster mobilisation in health crises (e.g., outbreaks) than matched controls [91].

The explicit statement of ICH’s dual role in emergencies is important. This suggests that elements of ICH often function as an inherent, pre-existing social and knowledge within communities. This knowledge can be mobilised more efficiently and culturally appropriately during emergencies than external, top-down interventions. The Vanuatu traditional building example is a clear empirical demonstration of this principle [66]. This highlights a critical need for emergency management and humanitarian aid organisations to integrate ICH considerations into their frameworks. This involves identifying and using existing community-based cultural resources and knowledge systems to enhance local adaptive capacities and is associated with more culturally appropriate and effective interventions. It calls for a paradigm shift from viewing communities primarily as passive recipients of aid to partners possessing invaluable internal resources for resilience.

The analysis implicitly argues for proactive safeguarding measures before crises occur, rather than solely reactive ones. It warns that policies must address the erosion of ICH due to societal challenges like urbanisation and migration, as these factors weaken the very ‘cultural operating system that communities rely on for resilience. If this fundamental ‘operating system’ is degraded, a community’s intrinsic ability to respond effectively to future shocks is severely compromised. This means that long-term societal resilience building requires continuous and sustained investment in ICH safeguarding as a potentially supporting capacity. It underscores the profound interconnectedness of cultural policy with broader societal issues such as urban planning, migration policies, and economic development, as these factors directly impact the viability and strength of ICH. Therefore, effective resilience strategies must adopt a holistic approach that recognises and mitigates threats to ICH as part of a broader risk reduction framework. Illustrative cases of how ICH elements have supported disaster risk management and recovery are presented in Table 2, showing the ways communities have drawn on living heritage during crises.

Table 2. Examples of ICH that have been mobilised in Disaster Risk Management and Recovery.

Project	Hazard	ICH Input	Mechanisms	Capacity	Outcome	Risks & Limits	Evidence
Reconciliation [45]	Armed conflict	I1, I3, I6	M1, M5, M2	C2, C3	O5, O3	BC4, R1, R2	A
Traditional architecture [66,70]	Tropical cyclones	I1, I5, I6	M1, M4	C1, C2	O1, O4	R3, R6, BC1, BC3	B
Dry-stone walling [85]	Land degradation/habitat loss	I1, I4	M1, M4	C1	O3, O9	BC2, R3, R1	B, C
Festivals [14]	Social stress and fragmentation	I3, I4	M1, M5	C1, C2	O1, O5	-	C
Community bread-baking [21]	COVID-19 Lockdown	I1, I4, I6	M1, M2	C1	O6, O5	BC1, BC4, R2, R3	C
Displaced populations [21,89]	Terrorism, Displacement	I3, I6	M3, M5	C2	O2, O3	R1, R4	B
Adaptations during COVID-19 [21]	COVID-19 pandemic	I3, I4, I6	M2, M3	C1, C2	O3, O2	-	B
Smithsonian FAC Training [26,67,90]	Conflict, quake, flood, fire	I1, I6	M1, M3, M5	C1	O1, O2	BC1, BC4, R2	A
UNESCO Capacity Building [89]	Conflict	I4, I6	M2, M5	C2	O2, O5	BC4, R1, R2	C
UNESCO Colombian Inventories [45]	Armed Conflict	I4, I5, I6	M2, M5	C2, C3	O5, O6	BC4, R1, R2	B

Table 2 (and Table 3, below) read as follows: columns show Mechanism(s), or how ICH does work (per §4.1), Capacity (absorptive/adaptive/transformative), and Risks/limits (from §2.5). ‘Evidence level’ is A/B/C as defined above.

The following illustrative ‘capsules’ trace how the mechanisms listed in Table 2 express specific capacities and where their limits arise.

• Co-design and public-space making. Participatory craft design in post-agreement Colombia exemplifies how collaboration can reconfigure social relations. Through the act of making together, former antagonists were able to construct new frameworks of mutual recognition. This process expressed a transformative social capacity: the emergence of trust and shared authorship where none previously existed. However, when these participatory forms were re-presented as cultural artefacts, their reconciliatory force risked being aestheticised. In such cases, design became a symbol of peace rather than a practice of it.
• Vernacular architecture know-how. The rebuilding of homes after Cyclone Pam demonstrated that indigenous architectural knowledge is not merely residual but dynamically adaptive. Traditional joinery, roof profiles, and material choices encode a fine-grained understanding of wind-shear dynamics and environmental fit. In reapplying this repertoire, communities mobilised an adaptive technical capacity that allowed them to reconstitute shelter rapidly and safely. Yet as external agencies translated this knowledge into prescriptive templates, the living logic of ‘kastom’ practice was diluted. The resulting codification imposed standardisation where local variation had been key to resilience.
• Synchronised manual cooperation. Dry-stone walling offers a microcosm of how rhythm and bodily coordination sustain community resilience. Collective maintenance of terraces and boundaries reinforces tacit timing and mutual reliance. This routine expresses absorptive social capacity: the power to persist through regular, low-level cooperation rather than through institutional intervention. Its fragility lies in dependence on voluntary effort. When participation becomes sporadic or burdensome, the shared rhythm falters, and with it, the stability of both landscape and social cohesion.
• Co-presence through festivals. Urban festivals are often the first civic forms to return after disruption. Their capacity lies not only in celebration but in the temporary reactivation of public space as a site of negotiation and belonging. In this sense, festivals cultivate adaptive civic capacity, restoring weak ties and stimulating small-scale initiatives. Yet the same visibility invites appropriation. When repeated as formulaic events for policy branding, festivals drift toward ‘festivalisation’, or a state where performance substitutes for participation, and symbolic cohesion conceals persistent divides.
• Everyday food-making routines. Shared bread-baking routines during lockdown illustrate how ordinary practices can buffer extraordinary stress. Familiar rhythms of kneading, heating, and sharing sustained local reciprocity and emotional continuity. Such routines exhibit absorptive psychosocial capacity: the maintenance of well-being through habitual cooperation. Their informality, however, makes them vulnerable to external mediation. Once reframed as public ‘good practice,’ these networks risk simplification.
• Ritualised joking and mediation customs. In Niger, ‘cousinage à plaisanterie’ (joking relationships) demonstrate how humour operates as a regulatory device. By institutionalising mock hostility between kin or ethnic partners, communities’ diffuse tension and maintain dialogue under strain. The practice builds adaptive social capacity, enabling contact across lines of conflict. Yet its authority is anchored in inherited roles. Where kinship boundaries fix who may joke with whom, the same mechanism that sustains peace can entrench exclusion, marginalising women or younger members whose voices remain outside the sanctioned circuit of play.
• Digital adaptation of rituals. When physical gatherings became impossible, communities repurposed online platforms to transmit ritual and support collective mourning. These adjustments exemplify adaptive psychosocial capacity, translating embodied togetherness into mediated form. The adaptation preserved meaning, but not access: participation depended on connectivity, literacy, and device availability. Thus, while the medium extended reach for some, it deepened the digital divide for others, transforming a social safeguard into a new vector of inequality.
• Cultural First Aid training. The ‘First Aid to Cultural Heritage’ initiative reframes emergency response as both technical and human care. By training local stewards to stabilise sites and practices in crisis, it enhances institutional and human adaptive capacity. Yet the conservation paradigm from which it emerges remains object-oriented. Unless the living dimensions of heritage are intentionally foregrounded, attention gravitates toward artefacts, and the very communities that embody resilience become peripheral to their own rescue.
• Capacity-building and policy mainstreaming. UNESCO’s training programmes in Cameroon illustrate how institutional capacity can be seeded through targeted interventions. Local committees learned to document, plan, and integrate ICH into disaster governance, thereby extending institutional adaptive capacity beyond the cultural sector. The outcome, however, remained fragile. When the external funding cycle ended, continuity relied on volunteer persistence. Dependency thus replaced empowerment, revealing the thin line between capacity transfer and capacity substitution.
• Community mapping and inventories. Community-led inventories in Colombia transformed documentation into a mode of governance. By mapping knowledge and skill, groups made visible their own contributions to peacebuilding and planning. This process reflected transformative governance capacity, or the reconfiguration of authority through participatory knowledge. Yet visibility brought new hierarchies. Where experts mediated access to recognition or resources, participatory mapping risked producing gatekeepers, reinstating asymmetry in the very spaces meant to dissolve it.

Taken together, the capsules show a progression from absorptive routines that stabilise daily life, through adaptive adjustments that reconfigure practice under pressure, to transformative shifts that alter governance relations. Importantly, each capacity carries characteristic risks, indicating that resilience gains are contingent on how mechanisms are institutionalised and by whom.

5.5. Peacebuilding and Post-Conflict Reconciliation

The Colombia case study is a prime example where ICH was utilised as a basis for resilience, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in post-agreement contexts. This initiative involved community-based inventorying and reflection on living heritage, collective memory, and the cultural aspects of their territory. The explicit aim was to achieve mutual recognition and forgiveness among communities profoundly affected by decades of armed conflict. The project specifically supported the transition of ex-combatants into civilian life by reinvigorating their local culture as a form of reparation [45]. The Indigenous Peacemaking Initiative by the Native American Rights Fund promotes and supports the continuation or revitalisation of traditional dispute resolution practices among Native peoples [92]. It utilises traditional rituals, such as the group circle and clan structures, to involve all interested parties in a shared search for understanding of the conflict. The collective aim is to identify necessary steps to assist in healing all affected parties and to prevent future conflicts. Young people in Jiquilisco and Tecoluca, El Salvador, participated in UNESCO-organised workshops that specifically addressed intangible cultural heritage and its various contributions to peacebuilding and conflict resolution [90]. The Berghof Foundation’s environmental peacebuilding programme in Somalia uses traditional, cultural, and religious resources to develop adaptive strategies for climate change and environmental protection, while simultaneously working to heal broken societal relationships [93]. Their radio programme, ‘Garasho-wadaag’ (meaning ‘sharing of knowledge’), promotes community dialogue around the complex nexus of climate change and conflict, using drama sketches and live discussions with community peacebuilders and local authorities [94].

5.6. A Mixed Outcome: Festivalisation and Urban Branding

Neighbourhood festivals used for place-branding can produce surface unity alongside gentrification and power re-routing. In Paris, civic actors leveraged festive events to signal diversity and attract new publics; while belonging narratives were amplified, real-estate dynamics and political positioning shaped uneven gains. The result is a mixed outcome: cohesion on event days, but displacement pressures and representation dilemmas in everyday life; an example of bonding cohesion that does not translate into resilience (§2.5; cf. §4.2–4.3) [22].

5.7. Global Use Cases and Agency-Level Programmes

The examples discussed in previous sections illustrate how ICH contributes to resilience by fulfilling three interconnected functions. They are read through the same frame as the cases, with risks/limits flagged (§§2.5, 4.1–4.3). We report mechanisms rather than assume uniform impact; evidence levels remain A/B/C as above.

First, ICH strengthens shared identity and social capital, as demonstrated by the Gullah-Geechee traditions in the United States and the Smart Indigenous Youth (SIY) programmes in Canada. These practices cultivate a deep sense of belonging and mutual obligation within communities. Similarly, community rituals in Montenegro provided inclusive frameworks for collective belonging, reinforcing trust and solidarity across diverse groups.

Second, ICH supports psychological coping and meaning-making in times of uncertainty. Land-based cultural immersion programmes, such as SIY, help individuals connect with their heritage and find personal grounding. In Uttarakhand, India, the revival of traditional rain myths served as a narrative tool for facing environmental unpredictability, helping communities contextualise risk within familiar cultural frameworks.

Third, ICH underpins informal governance and collective action. In Montenegrin villages, cooperative music and craft traditions provided a foundation for self-organisation, enabling communities to mobilise and make decisions collectively. In Uttarakhand, traditional ecological risk markers, embedded in local storytelling, guided communities in managing hazards and responding to emergencies without relying solely on external directives.

Across these contexts, ICH operates not merely as a cultural expression but as an embedded social system that fortifies identity, offers psychological resilience, and sustains practical mechanisms for self-organisation and adaptive response.

Beyond individual and community-level initiatives, ICH-based resilience is actively supported by a range of international agencies and multi-actor coalitions. These organisations operate at different scales using living heritage as a cross-sectoral tool for social cohesion, disaster recovery, climate adaptation, and peacebuilding. The following table summarises key programmes and mechanisms, highlighting their focus, operational approach, and representative examples that demonstrate how ICH is being integrated into resilience strategies worldwide. Table 3 provides an overview of agency-level programmes where ICH has been integrated into resilience strategies, illustrating the diversity of institutional approaches at national and international levels.

Table 3. Examples of Programmes where ICH has been integrated into Resilience Strategies.

Programme	Emergency/Hazard	ICH Input	Mechanism	Capacity	Outcome	Risks & Limits	Evidence
UNESCO ICH Capacity-Building [26,95,96]	All-hazards/DRR	I4, I6	M2, M5, M1	C1/C2	O2, O5	BC4, R1, R5	B
ICCROM ‘First Aid’ [26,97,98,99,100,101]	Conflict/Disaster emergencies	I1, I6	M1, M3, M5	C1	O1, O2	BC1, BC4, R1	B
CURE (World Bank & UNESCO, 2018) [9,102]	Post-disaster/Urban recovery	I4, I5, I6	M2, M4, M5	C2/C3	O5, O7	BC3, R4, R3	B
Culture 2030 Indicators (UNESCO/UIS)	Development/Urban policy	I3, I6	M5, M2	C2	O8	R5, R3	C
Community mapping (UNDP & UNESCO, 2014) [103,104,105,106]	Peacebuilding/Reintegration	I4, I5, I6	M2, M1	C2	O6, O5	BC4, R1, R2	B
Cultural Heritage in Action/Horizon instruments (EC, 2020–2025) [27,107]	Urban resilience/Social inclusion/Climate	I3, I4, I6	M1, M2, M5	C1/C2	O1, O5	R4, R3, R1	C
Cultural Rescue/First-Aid training [90]	General disasters	I1, I6	M1, M5, M3	C1	O1, O2	BC1, BC4, R2	C
City-level festival/ICH toolkits	Urban resilience/Cohesion	I3, I4	M1, M5	C1/C2	O1, O5	R4, R3, R1	C

Table 3. Examples of Programmes where ICH has been integrated into Resilience Strategies.

Programme	Emergency/Hazard	ICH Input	Mechanism	Capacity	Outcome	Risks & Limits	Evidence
UNESCO ICH Capacity-Building [26,95,96]	All-hazards/DRR	I4, I6	M2, M5, M1	C1/C2	O2, O5	BC4, R1, R5	B
ICCROM ‘First Aid’ [26,97,98,99,100,101]	Conflict/Disaster emergencies	I1, I6	M1, M3, M5	C1	O1, O2	BC1, BC4, R1	B
CURE (World Bank & UNESCO, 2018) [9,102]	Post-disaster/Urban recovery	I4, I5, I6	M2, M4, M5	C2/C3	O5, O7	BC3, R4, R3	B
Culture 2030 Indicators (UNESCO/UIS)	Development/Urban policy	I3, I6	M5, M2	C2	O8	R5, R3	C
Community mapping (UNDP & UNESCO, 2014) [103,104,105,106]	Peacebuilding/Reintegration	I4, I5, I6	M2, M1	C2	O6, O5	BC4, R1, R2	B
Cultural Heritage in Action/Horizon instruments (EC, 2020–2025) [27,107]	Urban resilience/Social inclusion/Climate	I3, I4, I6	M1, M2, M5	C1/C2	O1, O5	R4, R3, R1	C
Cultural Rescue/First-Aid training [90]	General disasters	I1, I6	M1, M5, M3	C1	O1, O2	BC1, BC4, R2	C
City-level festival/ICH toolkits	Urban resilience/Cohesion	I3, I4	M1, M5	C1/C2	O1, O5	R4, R3, R1	C

The following illustrative capsules trace how the mechanisms summarised in Table 3 translate into specific forms of capacity, and indicate the characteristic risks that accompany each institutional pathway.

• Peer-learning toolkits. Peer-learning formats translate dispersed practice into a shareable method. By normalising exchange across municipalities, they build adaptive institutional capacity, allowing teams to absorb techniques without wholesale restructuring. However, once ‘what works’ is encoded into calls and eligibility rules, the same clarity hardens into lock-in: smaller actors and bearer groups fail to qualify, and learning regresses to compliance.
• Public co-design. Co-design tasks convene heterogeneous publics around concrete problems. The immediate gain is absorptive civic capacity: routines of meeting, testing, and iterating that stabilise local cooperation under stress. Yet visibility invites festivalisation where events multiply while maintenance and transmission recede from view.
• Programme branding. When a recognised programme confers legitimacy on local initiatives, authorities become more willing to alter procedures and share authorship. This opens a channel to transformative governance capacity. The risk is intermediary displacement: consultants and anchor institutions speak for communities, and transformation becomes representational rather than material.
• Cultural first-aid. Emergency training that pairs heritage stabilisation with incident protocols builds adaptive capacity at two levels: institutions learn to act across silos; local stewards gain operational confidence. In practice, certification regimes can produce professional capture, that is, expert-centred command chains that marginalise bearers precisely when their repertoires are most actionable.
• Psychosocial stewardship. Framing care for places and practices as part of crisis response sustains belonging and reduces anxiety, yielding absorptive psychosocial capacity. Unless explicitly scoped, however, practice-based heritage is overshadowed by tangible bias: funds, metrics, and media gravitate to objects and sites, while the living circuits that make them meaningful are under-resourced.

Taken together, the instruments in Table 3 operate by making knowledge move (toolkits), making publics present (co-design), and making action legible (branding and certification). These mechanisms yield absorptive gains in everyday cooperation and psychosocial stability, adaptive gains in cross-silo coordination and procedure, and transformative shifts in who is authorised to decide. The characteristic risks follow directly from the mechanism: codification tends toward eligibility lock-in, visibility toward festivalisation, and professionalisation toward capture and tangible bias. Thus, the effectiveness of these instruments hinges not on the forms alone but on how eligibility, authorship, and accountability are designed.

The functional understanding of ICH informs the policy implications explored in Section 6. Recognising ICH as a cultural asset and a structural resource enables policymakers to design interventions that amplify these three functions, ensuring that safeguarding measures not only preserve heritage but can also enhance social cohesion and adaptive capacity in the face of contemporary challenges.

Across cases, ICH supports resilience when mechanisms align with governance: co-presence/synchrony and role scripts (coordination), shared idioms/gatherings (information flow), ritual frames (affect regulation), and locally tuned know-how (material options) yield absorptive and adaptive capacities (§4.1). Effects weaken where authority centralises, participation is procedural, or market/audit logics standardise repertoires (§2.5; §4.2–4.3). Successful translations share three conditions: devolved decision rights, benefit-sharing for bearers, and resourced transmission. Ambiguous cases (e.g., festival-led branding) underscore that bonding cohesion may not become resilience without these conditions. This comparative reading links §5 back to the model in §4 and sets up §6 on policy levers (mandates, funding, indicators) that lower the failure risks.

6. Policy Implications and Safeguarding

Recognising the profound impact of ICH on social cohesion and resilience necessitates policy interventions and safeguarding approaches that prioritise community empowerment and integration across various sectors. The UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the ICH has established a robust international legal framework for the recognition and safeguarding of living heritage. This framework emphasises that ICH is best safeguarded through human creativity and constant adaptation, aligning with the dynamic nature required for resilience. States Parties are obligated to inventory ICH, adopt supportive policies, encourage research, and may enable wide community participation in safeguarding efforts.

6.1. Primary Policy Levers

We prioritise four primary levers that, when present, reliably convert ICH-linked cohesion into resilience capacities (cf. §§2.5, 4.1–4.3). Enablers follow in §6.2; barriers and indicators in §§6.3–6.4.

L1. Mandates and governance alignment. Issue a cross-ministerial mandate that embeds ICH safeguarding in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), public health, urban recovery, education and environment, with a single accountable lead and shared targets. This reduces mandate misfit and clarifies who owns cross-cutting work (cf. §4.3).

L2. Authority and decision rights for bearers. Devolve decision rights (agenda-setting, budget sign-off, evaluation) to recognised bearer groups and require documented benefit-sharing rules. This turns participation from procedural to substantive and raises the cohesion→resilience conversion rate (§§2.5, 4.2–4.3).

L3. Funding and procurement fit. Create multi-year lines for transmission (apprenticeship, repertoire flexibility) and adjust procurement so informal groups qualify (fiscal host options, micro-grants). This counters short cycles and eligibility bias that otherwise standardise practice (§4.3).

L4. Monitoring-for-learning. Adopt a mixed-methods dashboard (quant + narrative) tied to the mechanisms in §4.1; use indicators to learn and adapt, not only to prove. Guard against performative indicator effects (see §6.4).

6.2. Enablers

Enablers help the levers travel; none substitutes for L1–L4.

E1. Education integration. Co-designed modules with local bearers; credit hours for apprenticeship; recognition of repertoire variants (avoids ritual rigidity).

E2. Urban and DRR tooling. Add ICH layers to city risk maps, recovery playbooks and shelter design checklists; include place-based repertoires in drills.

E3. Capacity networks. Local facilitator pools and peer-learning (municipal or NGO) to maintain who-can-do-what registers and rapid mobilisation lists.

E4. Ethical guardrails. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), benefit-sharing templates, anti-appropriation clauses; independent ombud for complaints (aligns with §2.5 risks).

6.3. Barriers and Mitigations

Table 4 summarises the institutional and political frictions that most often block the translation of ICH into resilience, the mechanism behind each, a case example from our corpus, and practical mitigations aligned to the four policy levers (L1–L4).

Table 4. Institutional/political frictions and how to lower them (linked to §§2.5, 4.2–4.3).

Friction	Mechanism	Example	Mitigation	Lever
Mandate misfit	No clear owner for cross-cutting work across ministries/agencies	Ravenna: integrating heritage DRM into planning tools	Cross-ministerial directive; designate a single lead agency with shared KPIs	L1
Short cycles; eligibility bias	Procurement excludes informal groups; annual budgets and short calls	Gullah-Geechee foodways micro-grants; Vanuatu rebuild	Micro-grants; fiscal hosts; multi-year transmission funding lines	L3
Procedural participation	Consent/forms stand in for decision power; agendas are pre-set	Peru (Eshuva) nomination debate	Devolve budget sign-off; publish benefit-sharing and decision-rights rules	L2
Metrics bias	Countables trump capability/transmission (audit over learning)	SDG-linked indicators used as targets	Mixed-methods dashboard; narrative reviews by bearers	L4
Standardisation/list-effects	Audit/tourism templates narrow repertoires; showcase > transmission	Dry-stone walling (Switzerland) showcases	Fund variants; qualitative audits of transmission depth	L3, L4
External intermediary capture	Brokers steer funds/visibility; bearer groups sidelined	Colombia post-agreement co-design	Local governance rules; cap intermediary fees; transparent reporting	L2, L3
Language and template gaps	Translation into audit categories strips context; vernacular specs misfit	Vanuatu: vernacular specs vs. procurement templates	Co-designed forms; glossary with local terms; reviewer training	L1, L3, L4
Urban festivalisation/branding	Place-branding raises visibility but fuels exclusion/gentrification.	Valparaíso socio-spatial change	Safeguard non-event transmission; anti-displacement clauses; benefit-sharing	L1, L3
TEK co-optation/benefit leakage	TEK extracted into programmes without community control	Samothráki revived knowledge	FPIC; community IP/benefit-sharing; co-authored protocols; local oversight	L2, L3

6.4. Monitoring and Indicators

Indicators in ICH governance are performative, as they shape what is done and seen [21,108]. We therefore limit metrics to those that track the mechanisms in §4.1 and pair each with a narrative account reviewed by bearers. The aim is learning whether we are converting cohesion into capacities, rather than audit-only. Each metric has caveats and must not be used as a proxy for ‘success’ in isolation. This is indicated in Table 5 below.

Table 5. Cultural-resilience indicators aligned to §4.1.

Construct	Indicator (Concise)	How to Measure (Source)	Freq.	Caveats
Decision rights	Percentage of budget lines where bearer groups have sign-off	Review MoUs/budgets; meeting minutes	6–12 m	Can be nominal without real control
Benefit-sharing	Share of programme funds reaching bearers	Financial reports; audited distributions	12 m	Sensitive; requires trust and safeguards
Transmission depth	Avg. apprenticeship hours per learner	Programme logs; school credit records	term	Hours ≠ quality; add narrative
Repertoire flexibility	Number of documented, accepted variants per practice	Inventory change logs; event repertoires	12 m	‘Variant’ may be a token; check usage
Bridging vs. bonding	Cross-group project ratio (bridging/total)	Participant rosters; network maps	6–12 m	Group categories context-specific
Mobilisation speed	Time from shock to mutual-aid activation	Incident logs; community apps/radios	event	Hard to standardise across hazards
Information flow	Percentage of gatherings used for risk/resource exchange	Short post-event surveys; facilitator notes	6 m	Social desirability bias; triangulate
Material know-how	Number of locally sourced techniques in active use	Field checks, maker logs, procurement records	12 m	‘Active use’ needs a clear definition
Legitimacy	Bearer satisfaction with programme relevance	Mini-surveys + open-ended interviews	6–12 m	Perception; pair with qualitative
Who-can-do-what	Completeness of the local skills register	Registry audit vs. observed practice	12 m	Completeness ≠ activation

6.5. Implementation Pathways

Implementation focuses on L1–L4 (mandates, decision rights, funding/procurement, monitoring-for-learning) piloted in 2–3 settings for 12–24 months, with the §6.4 dashboard used for adaptive management. Operationalising these recommendations requires an integrated, multi-actor approach that links cultural policy to resilience frameworks across government levels. The first step is to establish a formal inter-ministerial directive that embeds ICH safeguarding into disaster risk management, education, environmental, health, and cultural governance. Such a directive would enable policy coherence, mandate cross-sectoral collaboration, and provide the political mandate needed for sustained implementation.

To translate this mandate into practice, a permanent national ‘ICH × Resilience’ working group should be created. Chaired by the Ministry of Culture but with active participation from civil society organisations, youth groups, academic institutions, heritage practitioners, and DRR agencies, this body would coordinate actions, monitor progress, and serve as a forum for policy innovation. Nevertheless, it is not implied that ICH uniformly generates resilience across contexts. Rather, the paper highlights diverse paradigms in which ICH is framed as a resilience resource. The effectiveness of these framings depends on contextual, institutional, and community dynamics, which remain variable and contested.

Practical validation of these policies should occur through pilot programmes in at least three representative communities, selected to reflect diverse cultural, environmental, and socio-economic contexts. Each pilot would run for 12–24 months, during which both qualitative and quantitative outcomes would be monitored. Findings from these pilots would inform scaling strategies and highlight best practices adaptable to other regions.

Finally, for long-term visibility and accountability, a biennial ‘Cultural Resilience’ report should be institutionalised within national statistical reviews and SDG progress updates. This report would track cultural participation, youth engagement, adaptive knowledge retention, and other key indicators, allowing policymakers to assess the societal returns on ICH safeguarding and make data-driven adjustments to policy.

6.6. Limitations and Scope

This article is conceptual and policy-oriented. Evidence is drawn primarily from Type B/C sources (evaluations, documented programmes) rather than controlled impact studies, and findings are context-dependent. Mechanisms and conditions are specified, but effect sizes are not inferred. Coverage is uneven geographically and thematically, reflecting the distribution of available documentation. These limitations qualify claims and bound generalisation.

7. Conclusions

This article makes a single claim and then qualifies it. ICH can contribute to societal resilience, but only through identifiable mechanisms and only under specific conditions. We therefore reframed ICH as an analytic metaphor and specified a mechanism-led model that links ICH to cohesion (§3) and then to absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities (§4).

Three findings follow. First, cohesion arises from mechanisms that lower coordination costs and stabilise trust; yet the same repertoires draw boundaries, producing bridging or bonding depending on governance (§§2.5, 3). Second, conversion from cohesion to resilience is conditional: it holds where authority and decision rights are devolved to bearers and transmission is resourced; it weakens where participation is procedural, authority centralises, or repertoire standardisation serves audit/market needs (§§4.2–4.3). Third, across cases and programmes, what travels are mechanisms, not slogans: where inputs activate information flow, coordination, affect regulation, material know-how and legitimacy, capacities become observable (§5).

This reading has limits. Much of the evidence is Type B/C (evaluations and documented programmes rather than controlled studies). Effects are context-dependent and mediated by political economy; mechanism presence should not be conflated with impact size. Our scope is uneven geographically and biassed toward documented initiatives. These limits argue for caution in generalisation and for designs that test the conversion conditions rather than assume them.

Policy implications are therefore hierarchical. Primary levers are mandates and governance alignment, decision rights/benefit-sharing for bearers, funding and procurement that fit transmission, and monitoring-for-learning aligned to mechanisms (§6). Enablers (education, DRR/urban tooling, capacity networks, ethical guardrails) help these levers travel but do not substitute for them. Future work should evaluate the testable propositions in §4 using mixed-methods designs that pair simple indicators with narrative review by bearers. In this sense, the paper’s contribution is not to claim that ‘heritage saves,’ but to specify when and how ICH can help communities organise attention, effort and knowledge in the face of disturbance, and when it cannot.

8. Postiscriptum: Policy Recommendations

Building on the lessons from diverse case studies, several policy recommendations emerge for leveraging ICH as a driver of resilience and social cohesion. The following recommendations outline potential priority areas for embedding ICH in resilience policy.

8.1. Mainstream ICH into Governance and DRM

ICH should be mainstreamed into disaster risk management, peacebuilding, development, and cultural governance frameworks. The UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH already obligates States Parties to inventory and safeguard heritage, while UNDP’s PDNA Culture Guidance mandates the inclusion of intangible heritage in recovery planning. Practical examples, such as Kosovo’s ‘Inter-community Dialogue through Inclusive Cultural Heritage Preservation’ and UNESCO-funded projects in Cameroon and Niger, show how embedding ICH into conflict recovery and humanitarian settings sustains identity, strengthens social trust, and supports mental well-being [1,109,110]. Effective implementation requires formal policy amendments, the creation of ICH focal points within key ministries, and the integration of ICH assessments into all recovery frameworks.

8.2. Fund and Scale Community-Led ICH Projects

Governments should fund and scale community-led ICH projects that activate belonging, identity, and traditional knowledge. Case studies from Vanuatu, Poland, Latvia, and the Gullah-Geechee community in the United States reveal that when cultural practices are locally defined and community-driven, they generate both social cohesion and ecological benefits. Micro-grant programmes, heritage-and-resilience calls, and technical mentoring partnerships with UNESCO or UNDP can empower communities to define their own cultural assets and transmission methods, ensuring authentic, sustainable safeguarding.

8.3. Integrate ICH into Emergency Preparedness and Recovery

Emergency preparedness, first response, and reconstruction efforts must systematically integrate ICH safeguarding. Protocols such as ICCROM’s ‘First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis’ and the UNESCO-World Bank CURE framework [8,26,102] offer concrete workflows for protecting both tangible and intangible heritage during emergencies. Local emergency plans should designate ICH liaisons, map cultural bearers and spaces, and incorporate traditional architectural forms or ritual spaces into reconstruction.

8.4. Embed Intergenerational Transmission in Education Policy

Intergenerational transmission and adaptive knowledge must be embedded into education and youth policy. As shown by Bolivia’s Kallawaya healers, Indigenous youth programmes in Canada, and traditional apprenticeship routes worldwide, heritage-based learning strengthens identity, provides livelihoods, and builds resilience. Integrating ICH into curricula, vocational diplomas, and apprenticeship schemes can link young people directly to heritage bearers, ensuring continuity and relevance [41].

8.5. Incorporate TEK into Climate and Environmental Policy

TEK should be incorporated into climate and environmental policy. TEK, embedded in practices such as Samothráki’s revived agricultural techniques or Swiss dry-stone walling for biodiversity, offers locally grounded solutions for adaptation, conservation, and sustainable resource management. Environmental impact assessments should include consultations with heritage holders, and climate adaptation plans should map seasonal calendars, biodiversity practices, and customary land-use rights.

8.6. Integrate ICH into Urban Planning and Resilience

Integrate ICH into urban planning and resilience strategies. As demonstrated by Ravenna’s integration of cultural heritage DRM into planning tools [62] and the socio-spatial challenges of Valparaíso [52], ICH must be recognised as part of the urban system. Embedding heritage in resilience planning strengthens place attachment, mitigates risks of gentrification, and balances conservation with adaptation. Urban authorities should establish ICH focal points within planning

8.7. Establish Monitoring and Evaluation for ICH Resilience

Governments need robust monitoring and evaluation systems to capture ICH-based resilience synergies. Standard economic indicators fail to measure identity, trust, and collective efficacy. A ‘Cultural Resilience Scorecard’ could track participation rates in cultural events, youth engagement in traditional skills, well-being indicators, and the presence of ICH elements at risk. Aligning these measures with UNESCO’s SDG indicators can support coherence and international comparability, while periodic evaluations can inform adaptive policy.

These recommendations position ICH not as a peripheral cultural concern but as an element of resilience policy. By embedding heritage into governance systems, empowering community-led action, integrating cultural safeguarding into crisis and climate strategies, and tracking its societal impacts, policymakers can support that living heritage continues to anchor identity, strengthen solidarity, and enhance adaptive capacity in an increasingly uncertain world.

While the preceding sections emphasise the positive contributions of ICH to cohesion and resilience, it is equally important to acknowledge its complexities and risks. Heritage policies and practices can produce exclusions, politicisation, or commodification alongside their intended benefits. Table 6 synthesises the policy pillars discussed in this section, linking each to concrete actions, illustrative cases, intended outcomes, and associated risks or limitations. It provides a comparative overview of how ICH has been mobilised across different policy domains, while also acknowledging potential unintended consequences. This allows each policy pillar to be viewed not only in terms of its outcomes but also with respect to the possible unintended consequences that must be anticipated and mitigated.

Table 6. Policy Implications and Potential Safeguarding Approaches.

Policy Pillar	Key Action	Example Case	Intended Outcome	Risks & Limitations
ICH in Governance	Amend DRM/law frameworks	Kosovo inter-community project	Builds trust across ethnic lines	Risk of politicisation; state-led heritage policies may marginalise minority voices
Community Grants	Micro-grants for festivals/crafts	Gullah-Geechee foodways, Vanuatu construction	Improves identity and local economy	Unequal access to funding can privilege visible/lobbying groups, excluding others.
Crisis Preparedness	ICH-first-aid protocols	Gujarat earthquake heritage intervention	Prevents loss of rituals/spaces	Standardisation may ‘freeze’ practices; external actors may override local agency.
Education	Land-based transmission programmes	Indigenous youth resilience in Canada	Strengthens intergenerational identity	Risk of tokenism if heritage is added superficially to curricula.
Climate Policy	TEK in adaptation plans	Samothráki and Swiss dry-stone walling	Enhances biodiversity, local adaptation	TEK may be co-opted or commercialised without fair community benefit.
Urban Planning/Resilience	Integrate ICH into urban resilience and planning tools	Ravenna case study [62]; Valparaíso socio-spatial change [52]	Embeds heritage in urban policy; balances conservation with adaptation; prevents gentrification risks	Gentrification risk: commodification of festivals for tourism may erode authenticity.
M&E Systems	Cultural resilience indicators	UNESCO SDG-linked metrics	Tracks cohesion and psychosocial well-being	Indicators risk oversimplifying lived cultural complexity.

In humanitarian and disaster risk reduction (DRR), ICH plays a dual role, being both vulnerable and a resource for preparedness, response, and recovery. Policies must incorporate ICH into DRR frameworks, recognising traditional knowledge as an effective tool [40]. This necessitates collaboration between cultural heritage and emergency management stakeholders. For peacebuilding and reconciliation, ICH can form a foundation for dialogue, mutual understanding, and reconciliation in post-conflict contexts, helping to revitalise the social fabric and promote peaceful coexistence. It is a valuable asset for long-term peace and stability.

Finally, integrating ICH into formal and non-formal education programmes is critical for intergenerational transmission. It enhances relevance for students, builds pride and belonging, social resilience and dialogue [6]. The ethical imperative of safeguarding is also paramount. ICH safeguarding must be compatible with existing international human rights instruments, and with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development. The potential for culture to be manipulated, instrumentalised, and even destroyed, to fuel conflict, highlights the need for vigilance and robust ethical frameworks in all ICH-related interventions, ensuring that heritage is used for positive societal outcomes and not for division or exploitation.