ICH Courier

hen UNESCO convened the World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development—MONDIACULT 2025— in Barcelona, Spain (29 September–1 October 2025), culture was not treated as a ‘luxury’ or an ‘added value’ to development, but as a political arena where rights, resources, technology, climate action, education, and peacebuilding intersect. Bringing together ministers of culture, policymakers, academics, civil society representatives, and youth leaders, the conference aimed to redefine the role of culture within global development governance. The conference culminated in an official Outcome Document
that reaffirms MONDAICULT 2022 Declaration and frames culture as a global public good and positions cultural policy as a core instrument for building more just, inclusive, peaceful, and sustainable societies.
Within that broad agenda, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) appears less as a separate ‘heritage sector’ and more as a connective tissue running through multiple policy debates. In other words, MONDIACULT did not ask only, “How do we safeguard heritage?” It asked a sharper question: “What kind of governance makes living culture viable— fairly, sustainably, and with dignity—under compounding global pressures?” That shift in framing is significant for the ICH field because it moves safeguarding away from event based visibility and toward structural policy conditions: participation, equity, inter-ministerial coordination, ethical
data governance, and investment models that recognize long-term public value.

From Safeguarding to ‘Cultural Rights’: ICH as Lived Citizenship
A defining discourse at MONDIACULT 2025 is the repositioning of cultural rights as human rights. The Outcome Document explicitly recognizes the right to participate in cultural life, artistic freedom, and the protection of cultural and linguistic diversity as integral to human dignity and democratic governance.
For the ICH field, this framing has profound implications because safeguarding has often been interpreted as documentation, listing, and promotion—important  tools, but insufficient if communities cannot actually shape decisions that affect their heritage. MONDIACULT’s emphasis on inclusive governance offers a policy mandate to redesign safeguarding so that bearers and practitioners are not treated as ‘beneficiaries’ but as co-designers of cultural policy. This is where ‘meaningful participation’ becomes more than a slogan. It becomes a governance requirement: policies must enable communities—including minorities, Indigenous Peoples, migrants, and other marginalized groups—to co-design the rules, not simply comply with them.
In MONDIACULT’s broader language, cultural rights also connect to democratic resilience. The message is not that culture decorates democracy, but that it constitutes democratic life: the ability to express, contest, remember, and imagine together. For ICH, this is an invitation to treat safeguarding as civic infrastructure—something that protects social trust and dignity, not only ‘tradition.’

Education as Transmission Infrastructure: Living Rractices through Formal and Informal Learning
MONDIACULT 2025 repeatedly connects culture and education, calling for culture, heritage, and arts to be integrated across formal, non-formal, and informal education. This is crucial for ICH because transmission is rarely confined to classrooms; it happens in families,

apprenticeship, community gatherings, and everyday practices. Yet education systems can either support or disrupt these pathways—by valorizing dominant languages and standardized curricula while marginalizing local knowledge.
At MONDIACULT, the education discourse also treats cultural learning as a civic capacity: building empathy, social cohesion, and the ability to live with difference. In ICH perspective, this reframes ‘transmission’ from mere technical continuity to social reproduction of values, relationships, and community responsibilities. It validates initiatives that link schools to living tradition spaces (workshops, community studios, local festivals) and that recognize bearers as educators.
The policy implication is clear. If education is treated as transmission infrastructure, then safeguarding strategies should include educational reforms and  partnerships—not as add-ons or mere ‘culture classes,’ but as core measures.

Culture for Peace: ICH as Social Repair and Dialogue
Another central MONDIACULT framing is that culture is not simply a tool for peace; it is part of what peace is made of—through dialogue, dignity, memory, and trust. The Outcome Document highlights culture’s role in preventing conflict, supporting reconciliation, and protecting cultural diversity and artistic freedom, especially in polarized contexts.
ICH fits naturally here because living heritage often functions as a community’s grammar for addressing rupture: ritual practices for mourning, storytelling that restitches identity after displacement, collective performances that transform trauma into shared meaning, and customary systems that mediate conflicts. But MONDIACULT’s peace discourse also implies a risk that instrumentalizing cultural practices as quick ‘peace interventions’ without respecting community agency. A rights-based approach is therefore essential—peace-oriented ICH policy must prioritize consent, community leadership, and sensitivity to power dynamics (including gender, class, and ethnicity).
If cultural rights are the anchor, then peace-oriented heritage policy should recognize ICH as an arena of community-led social repair, while safeguarding it from political appropriation and ensuring practitioners’ safety and freedom of expression.

Climate Action for Cultural Resilience: from ‘Protecting Sites’ to Sustaining Lifeways
MONDIACULT 2025 places culture, heritage, and climate action in the same policy frame, emphasizing that climate change threatens heritage and that cultural knowledge can strengthen adaptation and resilience. Importantly, it recognizes indigenous and traditional knowledge as part of climate solutions, and calls for integrating cultural  dimensions into climate policy.
For living heritage, climate change is not only a threat to heritage itself. It disrupts the conditions that make practices possible in seasonal calendars, ecological materials and relocation that breaks community networks, or disaster recovery that prioritizes infrastructure over cultural continuity. MONDIACULT’s climate discourse supports a wider definition of ‘heritage at risk,’ where safeguarding includes maintaining the conditions for practice: access to lands and waters, continuity of livelihoods, and the intergenerational transfer of environmental knowledge.
Indigenous Knowledge, Ancestral Places: Navigating Change in UNESCO Designated Sites (UNESCO, 2025) and The Green Paper on Sustainable Cultural Heritage Management (Government of Spain, 2025) presented in MONDIACULT reinforces a ‘living document’ approach, emphasizing tools, benchmarks, and adaptive governance rather than static protection models. While often discussed in relation to broader heritage, its emphasis on resilience, cross-sector coordination, and continuous updating resonates with ICH safeguarding in a climate-unstable world.
MONDIACULT’s framing supports integrated climate heritage policy lens and expands what ‘risk’ means: vitality of practices, continuity of transmission,  ommunity access to cultural-ecological resources, and cultural security in relocation or disaster contexts.

Crisis, Displacement, and Cultural Continuity
MONDIACULT’s Outcome Document explicitly  addresses crisis situations—conflict, disasters, displacement, and illicit trafficking—arguing that cultural protection must be integrated into preparedness, response, and recovery.
In practice, ICH in crises raises difficult policy questions. How do you safeguard practices when communities are dispersed? How do you support bearers when cultural spaces become unsafe? How do you prevent ‘emergency documentation’ from becoming extractive, capturing recordings without returning benefits or control? MONDIACULT’s policy direction points toward a more humane crisis framework: one that recognizes culture as part of dignity and recovery, not a luxury after ‘real needs’ are met. Of course, for ICH safeguarding, this implies practical measures with answers of the above questions.

Digital Transformation and AI: Access, Diversity, and New Risks for ICH
Digital transformation is treated at MONDIACULT 2025 as both a democratizing opportunity and a driver of new inequities. The Outcome Document calls for emphasizes equitable access, closing digital divides, safeguarding cultural and linguistic diversity online, and protecting creators’ rights in digital ecosystems.
For ICH, the digital promise is real. Community-led archives can support transmission across distance; digital storytelling can strengthen youth engagement; and new tools can document practices with care. But MONDIACULT’s discussions, it also underscores risks that are especially acute for living heritage: platform-driven homogenization (a “mono-culture” effect), misrepresentation of sacred or sensitive knowledge, and the extraction of cultural data for commercial AI systems without consent or benefit-sharing.
The ‘Digital Culture for All by 2035’ policy debate featured in MONDIACULT programming emphasized human-centered design, rights-based internet access, and the protection of linguistic diversity, aligning with ICH needs where language is often inseparable from practice.
AI adds further complexity. If AI systems train on recordings of songs, stories, or designs, who owns the outputs? How are communities credited or compensated? How do we prevent synthetic content from diluting authenticity or enabling cultural appropriation at scale? MONDIACULT’s framing—responsible, ethical, transparent, inclusive AI, with protection for creators and cultural diversity—creates a policy umbrella under which ICH-specific rules (community consent, data governance, and benefit-sharing) can be developed.

Financing, Decent Work, and Data: Making ICH Policy Implementable
Finally, MONDIACULT 2025 strongly signals that cultural policy must be implementable backed by financing mechanisms, decent work protections, and evidence systems.
The Outcome Document calls for strengthening cultural and creative sectors, ensuring fair remuneration and labor rights, and building shared cultural data infrastructures and indicators to measure culture’s impact on sustainable development.
This is decisive for ICH, where many practitioners operate in informal economies and face structural vulnerability. If culture is to be treated as a public good, ICH bearers need more than celebratory festivals; they need social protection, stable support for transmission spaces, and financing models that recognize long-term value rather than short-term visibility.
MONDIACULT also elevated cultural data as a policy priority, pointing toward standardized systems and ethical frameworks. For ICH, the challenge will be  designing indicators that measure vitality, transmission, equity, and community agency—not only attendance numbers or digital reach. Evidence should help protect meaning, not replace it with metrics.

Toward an Integrated Approach: ICH as the ‘Through-line’ from MONDIACULT 2025
MONDIACULT 2025 is summarized through its major themes—rights, education, economy, peace, climate, crisis, digital transformation, and AI. ICH was not discussed explicitly but it is the through-line that makes these themes concrete. ICH is where cultural rights become everyday practice, where education becomes transmission, where climate policy meets lived lifeways, where peace becomes social repair, and where digital futures raise urgent questions about consent, ownership, and diversity. The conference’s one of direct objectives represented through launching of UNESCO Global Report on Cultural Policies —Culture: The missing SDG (UNESCO, 2025)—building momentum for culture to be recognized as a stand alone goal in the post-2030 development framework—also matters for ICH because it could strengthen the political mandate for long-term investment in this field.
The policy message emerging from MONDIACULT 2025 is not simply ‘safeguard heritage,’ but ‘rebuild cultural governance’ around participation, equity, cross-sector coordination, and ethical innovation. And it challenges cultural policy to become less ‘too polite’—less satisfied with declarations—and more operational. For the ICH field, his creates both an opportunity and a responsibility: to translate high-level commitments into practical frameworks that safeguard living heritage while empowering the people who carry it—especially in a world shaped by compounding crises and accelerating technological change.