Stakeholder Roles in the Participatory Management of Diasporic Built Heritage: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Community participation is widely recognised as essential for sustainable heritage management. While international doctrines increasingly advocate participatory approaches, heritage management practices remain largely place-based and continue to prioritise territorially defined local communities. In the context of international migration and diaspora, such approaches inadequately address diasporic built heritage, whose cultural significance is conveyed by transnational diasporic communities across countries of origin and destination. Limited research has examined how diasporic communities negotiate their roles with other stakeholders in the participatory management of diasporic built heritage. This study presents a systematic literature review of 106 English-language publications, following the PRISMA guidelines, to examine how diasporic communities and other stakeholders participate in the management of diasporic built heritage. The analysis focuses on (1) mapping the geographic, institutional, and thematic patterns of current research, and (2) analysing stakeholder categories and cross-sector roles across origins and destinations. The results reveal a diverse, but uneven, geographic distribution of the case studies and institutions retrieved from English-language publications. A stakeholder framework is developed to bridge minority and mainstream (cross-sector) roles across origins and destinations, offering insights into the comprehensive understanding and identification of stakeholder roles for fostering further novel research on diasporic built heritage.