Promoting sustainable development through intangible cultural heritage

Current academic theories and sustainable development planning provide little practical guidance to ICH communities on how to ensure that commercialisation of heritage-based market offerings supports heritage safeguarding and results in sustainable development. Work in this area has so far mostly focused on the dangers of over-commercialisation and the risks of de-contextualization, distracting from a more comprehensive investigation of ways to maintain and transmit heritage skills and knowledge while supporting sustainable economic development. The HIPAMS India project, funded by a three-year British Academy grant (2018-2021), aimed to help such communities by co-creating heritage-sensitive intellectual property and marketing strategies, or HIPAMS. This chapter sets out some theoretical and practical insights from our work on HIPAMS by explaining the HIPAMS process, highlighting the importance of community involvement in the co-creation of heritage-sensitive intellectual property and marketing strategies, and discussing key elements in its conceptual model. We suggest that planning heritage-sensitive commercialisation, i.e. commercialisation that supports heritage safeguarding, requires paying attention to questions of community engagement and empowerment, maintaining the heritage skills repertoire and keeping the tradition alive through heritage-sensitive innovation, and supporting or enhancing the reputation of the products or services in the marketplace. Experiences of co-creating and implementing HIPAMS suggest that such strategies can help to empower artist communities and promote sustainable incomes while reaffirming the value of their heritage both within and outside their communities.