The Compensation Trap.
The engagement meant to identify intangible heritage can manufacture the very risk it was there to manage. Avoiding that is a core skill.
By Neil Fairburn · Director, Cultural Heritage Risk Management Ltd
There is a risk in intangible heritage work that almost no methodology names out loud, and it is created by the methodology itself. The standards tell you to engage communities to identify the heritage a project might affect. Done badly, that engagement manufactures the very problem it was meant to manage. This is the compensation trap, and handling it well is one of the core skills of the discipline.
Why asking can backfire
Put yourself on the other side of the table. A well resourced project arrives and asks which places, practices and resources your community values. It is not unreasonable to hear that as a question about what the project will pay for. Once that interpretation takes hold, three failure modes follow, and they tend to arrive together. Expectations of compensation inflate beyond anything the project discussed. Sites and practices are reported that do not exist, or whose significance is overstated, in the hope of a payment. And when the expectations raised by the conversation are not met, the result is grievance, which is precisely the outcome the engagement was supposed to prevent.
Why a lender should care
This is not only a community relations problem. A grievance log filling with intangible heritage compensation claims is a due diligence flag, and a baseline padded with unverifiable sites is worse than a thin one, because it cannot be defended and it cannot be managed. A lender reviewing the project cannot tell a real sacred site from a speculative one, and neither, by then, can the project. The credibility of the whole cultural heritage assessment is what is at stake, and credibility is the thing lenders are actually buying.
Separate the two conversations
The discipline that prevents this is a clean separation between the heritage conversation and any conversation about benefits or compensation. Facilitators do not imply benefit, do not hint at entitlement, and do not speculate about what might be paid. Questions about compensation are acknowledged and routed, to the formal project information channels and to the grievance mechanism, not answered in the room. The heritage engagement is framed, consistently and from the first minute, as a process of understanding and respect, not a negotiation. That framing has to be real. If the project is in fact deciding compensation elsewhere, the separation is a sequencing choice, not a deception, and it should be explained as such.
Triangulate before you believe
The defence against fabricated sites is corroboration. Any new or previously unknown site or practice, particularly one tied to ritual or to a specific location, should be confirmed across different stakeholders before it enters the baseline. Triangulation is not distrust of communities; it is the same evidentiary discipline applied to intangible heritage that nobody questions for the tangible. A single claimant gives you a lead to test, not yet a finding. Several independent accounts that agree are a finding worth recording and managing.
The tension you have to hold
Here is the part that resists a neat rule. Transparency and expectation management pull against each other. You owe communities a clear explanation of why you are asking and what will be done with what they share, and that honesty is itself part of good engagement. Yet the clearer you are that the project is assessing impacts, the more naturally a community wonders what follows for the things it names. You do not resolve that tension by choosing a side. You hold it, by being transparent about purpose while being disciplined about benefit. Done well, this is not a defence the project mounts against a community. It is how a project protects and supports one: heritage recorded and respected rather than quietly catalogued, concerns carried to the people with the power to act on them, and a community that is genuinely listened to rather than merely surveyed. The next piece takes up what that support can look like when it is built into a project from the start.
Part 3 of 7 in the Intangible Heritage series. Previous: You Cannot Survey a Memory. Next: A Legacy, Not a Liability.