Prabartana is a social enterprise working in diverse sections for revival which includes: arts, crafts, food security, and community-led responsible tourism. The organization provides training to weavers and has contributed to technical enhancement through documentation of patterns in computers instead of the manual style of Jacquard pattern design. As safeguarding action, they involve artisans in exhibitions and workshops for cultural exchange, audio-visual documentation and publication of books, social media-based promotions and audience development through the Web, newspaper articles and festival-relevant brochures. The organization also promotes community-led responsible tourism through AJIYER, where the community has the rights and knowledge to operate tours and promote and conserve cultural heritage, apart from safeguarding their environment.

The National Institute of Folk & Traditional Heritage, popularly known as Lok Virsa, was established by the government of Pakistan in 1974 with a mandate to collect, document, preserve, and disseminate Pakistan’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

Folkland, International Centre for Folklore and Culture is a nonprofit NGO devoted to promoting folklore and culture. Headquartered in Kerala in south-western India, Folkland has three main centers and several chapters in India and associations with other organizations abroad through MOUs and collab-orative partnerships. Folkland has been affiliated with the UNESCO ICH sector since 2010. Folkland envisions a society that respects cultural heritage by conserving arts and cultural traditions and transmitting them to future generations. As such, Folkland is proudly dedicated to promoting Indian culture and values with a focus on intangible cultural heritage. The center provides access to knowledge and information about intangible cultural heritage and is known for promoting indigenous culture that inspires audiences to explore the cultural and artistic heritage of Kerala. The main domains covered by Folkland are performing arts; oral traditions and expressions; social practices, rituals, and festivals; and traditional crafts. Folkland documents oral traditions and practices and extends training to younger genera-tions to revitalize old and near-extinct traditional art forms. One ICH element of particular interest to Folkland is tolpavakoothu (shadow puppetry).

Thundukuna is a special mat woven from reeds indigenous to the marshlands of Maldives. The reed is locally known as hau. Mat weaving from hau dates back some two hundred years, and this long history is mostly associated with the southernmost atolls.

Central Asia stands at the crossroads of ancient civilisations. Its territory, crossed by the northern part of the great Silk Road, constitutes an ensemble of cultural heritage sites and monuments that express common historical experiences as well as reflect an extraordinary cultural diversity dating from prehistoric times to the Islamic period and beyond. For centuries, the phenomenon of intangible cultural heritage was a key factor for the transmission of indigenous cultural traditions for future generations as well as a matching point for intercultural dialogue in Central Asia—a region with unique oral and music traditions.

The main contents of this publication are reports from thirty-two nations collected by ICHCAP from 2009 to 2015 as part of its annual projects to collect information on intangible cultural heritage safeguarding in the Asia-Pacific region. We have also compiled information from other reports and conference materials collected by ICHCAP to present key data, such as national inventories and information on related organizations, in an easily accessible format.

Kazakhstan is characterized by ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. However, the nation has not always had such a multiethnic composition. In the 1920s, Kazakhstan was a republic of the USSR and was mainly monoethnic. The Stalinist leadership aimed at eradicating social classes. To reach this goal, terror and intimidation were employed, targeting mostly members of the clergy, opposition leaders, intellectuals, artists, and former tsarist-government officials. Starting in 1934, political repression was particularly strong. Millions of Soviet citizens were exiled to the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Opponents to the Bolsheviks from all over the USSR were held prisoner in concentration camps located in Kazakhstan.

In reality, safeguarding ICH (or whatever term one uses)1 has been an important issue for the large majority of countries around the globe and their citizens long before the 2003 Convention was adopted. The ‘problem’ of ICH, therefore, was a lack of formal international recognition of this reality and a cultural heritage protection paradigm that prioritised monumental European cultural forms over local and indigenous ones and that, when it addressed traditional culture, it did so from a heavily researcher-oriented viewpoint. The experience of those countries that are Parties to the 2003 Convention shows clearly that ICH in all its various forms is a rich social and, often, economic and even political resource that provides a variety of possible routes towards sustainable models of development. This variety is determined by many social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental factors and is itself part of the invaluable diversity of this form of heritage.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the use of words related to sustainability. Issues of interrelatedness and interdependence, the centrality of diversity to most healthy biological systems, and the expansion of detailed scientific thinking about conservation have all contributed to the increase in the use of ecological metaphors in a wide range of fields. Those of us laboring in the realms of culture have found useful language and compelling metaphors, including cultural sustainability. When conservation biology began to popularize the idea of sustainability in their efforts to sustain biodiversity, Jeff Todd Titon began to explicitly advocate for an ecological approach to musical sustainability in 2006.

'Ariyapala&Sons' is a non-profit organization that works with the mask-making community in Ambalangoda. They have also developed a cultural center in the southern coastal region of Sri Lanka, well known for traditional masks and mask dancing. Ariyapala & Sons has established a mask museum in Ambalangoda . The museum is designed to introduce the viewer into the richness of the mask tradition of Ambalangoda and to strengthen this cultural heritage.

Impulse Social Enterprises (ISE) is a sister organization of Impulse NGO Network (INGON) which is combating human trafficking in Northeast India for 25 years. Lack of education, poverty, and porous borders are the main reasons why Northeast India is a soft target for human trafficking. ISE focuses primarily on the ‘prevention’ and ‘protection’ aspects of the model that would stop human trafficking before it happens. It has partnered with other organizations in each of the eight states of the Northeast in an effort to help six Rs: Rehabilitate, Repatriate, Reintegrate, Recompensation, Report, and Rescue of trafficking victims. ISE also realized that it was just not enough to rescue and repatriate victims, it was also important to tackle the root cause of the problem, which is abject poverty and lack of sustainable livelihood in many indigenous areas.

Based on the accumulated experience over the course of fifteen years since the adoption of the 2003 Convention, Southeast Asia is well known for its diverse and abundant intangible heritage. Many states in this region have already initiated ICH safeguarding plans with active participation of communities.\nHowever, a number of Member States are still having difficulties employing community‐based safeguarding plan and programs. In implementing the 2003 Convention, much attention should be paid to build capacity to support and safeguard a wider range of ICH Stakeholders, including communities, group, and individuals.\nTherefore, this session will provide an opportunity to share experiences and discuss on the roles the community should exercise in safeguarding ICH. In this session, we will discuss the following questions: (1) Do ICH communities, groups, individuals, and practitioners fully recognise the spirit and significance of the 2003 Convention? (2) Are they subsequently assigned to embody appropriate roles?