This paper explores intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as an active agent of sustainable development, rather than a static resource to preserve. Based on practices in a regional Quebec context, it examines how ICH shapes relationships between people, places, and environments, fostering social cohesion, local resilience, and adaptation to change. Heritage practices are shown to produce relational effects, including the negotiation of shared norms, transmission of values, and continuity across generations. By framing ICH as a dynamic enabler, the paper challenges policy-driven or purely instrumental approaches to sustainability, highlighting its potential to actively shape sustainable futures. This contribution aligns with the ACHS theme Tūhono – weaving relational heritage spaces and the sub-theme Heritage and sustainability, offering a critical, situated, and relational perspective on heritage’s role in ethical human-environment relations.

This study examined the cultural transformation of the Wangchuan Ceremony at Fumei Temple following its inscription on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of "The Invention of Tradition," it examines how the ceremony’s form, function, and meanings have been reshaped by global heritage discourse. The research focuses on the balance between cultural preservation and adaptation, highlighting the evolution of the ceremony from its original purpose of warding off plagues to a formal, celebratory event. Key transformations include the shift to a quadrennial occurrence, the introduction of new rituals, and increased government involvement. Ethnographic methods reveal the hybrid roles of temple members as both religious practitioners and cultural collaborators. This case demonstrates how intangible cultural heritage is reshaped through negotiations between local traditions, state involvement, and global influences, illustrating the complex interplay of preservation and reinvention in contemporary heritage practices.

Under the UNESCO Intangible Heritage of washoku (“Japanese food”) are many food heritage products and traditions specific to local regions in Japan. In recent years, however, climate change has led to unstable, decreasing, and lower-quality supplies of such food products, thereby threatening the existence of their associated food heritages. This paper discusses fugu (pufferfish), the poisonous but valued delicacy that is identified with Shimonoseki in southern Japan, to illustrate global warming’s effects on food heritage. Although Shimonoseki’s artisanal fugu food culture has long been recognized as its heritage, it is currently threatened by rising sea temperatures that have caused fugu catches to fall from nearly 2,000 tons annually until the 1990s to below 100 tons in the past decade. This paper investigates Shimonoseki’s ways of coping with its diminishing heritage, as well as food heritage’s particular vulnerability amidst climate change and the implications for food as a category of heritage.

This paper examines how relational understandings of heritage are negotiated in everyday practice under conditions of policy and institutional constraint. It draws on practitioner experience across World Heritage governance and community-based conservation in South Asia, with case contexts including Taj Ganj (Agra), Hampi, and Jaisalmer Fort. Rather than approaching heritage policy as an abstract framework, the paper treats it as a lived condition that shapes what forms of heritage can be recognised, supported, or sustained. Focusing on relational sustainability, the paper shows how heritage practices routinely exceed categorical distinctions between tangible and intangible, cultural and natural, requiring ongoing mediation by practitioners and communities. It argues that sustainable heritage futures are not pre-designed outcomes but remain contingent, unresolved, and grounded in everyday work to hold heritage together across people, place, and practice.