Co-Creating Meaningful Futures: Cultural Heritage, Community Agency and Sustainable Tourism
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Tourism, Culture, and Heritage".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2027 | Viewed by 888
Special Issue Editor
Interests: (intangible) cultural heritage tourism; digital heritage experiences; accessible tourism; tourism social impacts; travel motives & behaviour
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Cultural heritage, particularly intangible cultural heritage (ICH), is increasingly positioned as a catalyst for sustainable tourism. Yet, much of the literature still treats heritage as an asset to be packaged, branded, or digitised, often downplaying questions of meaning, community agency, and safeguarding. This Special Issue addresses these gaps by advancing research that understands heritage, especially living practices and their integration in tourism, as a space for ethical engagement, reciprocity, and long-term stewardship.
This Special Issue aims to consolidate and extend emerging work on community-centred, co-creative heritage tourism and its contribution to sustainability outcomes aligned with Sustainability’s scope, including social and cultural sustainability, governance, and responsible innovation. We welcome contributions that critically examine how heritage-based tourism can create value for visitors while strengthening custodians’ capacities, wellbeing, and safeguarding efforts. We also invite nuanced perspectives on technology, emphasising careful, evidence-based integration where digital tools demonstrably enhance meaning-making, inclusion, and sustainability rather than novelty.
This Special Issue aims to advance research on heritage, especially living practices and their integration into tourism, as a space for ethical engagement, reciprocity, and long-term stewardship, and to critically examine how heritage-based tourism can create value for visitors while strengthening custodians’ capacities, well-being, and safeguarding efforts.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Suggested themes include (but are not limited to) the following: co-creation with ICH custodians; participatory governance and power relations; experience design that transfers cultural meaning; safeguarding impacts and evaluation; resident/visitor learning and transformative outcomes; responsible digital mediation (AR/VR, AI, platforms); ICH integrity, commodification, and ethics; climate and resilience implications; and indicators for cultural sustainability.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Marco Scholtz
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- intangible cultural heritage
- tangible cultural heritage
- sustainable tourism
- co-creation
- community-based heritage tourism
- cultural sustainability
- meaningful tourism experiences
- ICH safeguarding
- participatory governance
- ethical tourism
- responsible use of technology
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