For years, international institutions have learned to recite a formula that seems beyond dispute. Communities must be listened to. In climate governance, in heritage conservation and in debates on biodiversity, Indigenous and local participation increasingly appears as a condition of legitimacy.

But listening is not the same as deciding.

Today that participation is no longer negotiated only in meeting rooms. It also passes through databases, forms, platforms, classification systems and tools that turn territorial experiences into comparable information. The question is no longer only who manages to speak, but who decides how what is said gets recorded and what later uses that record allows.

In June 2026, that tension became visible in two distinct settings. In Bonn, the UNFCCC’s Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform held a workshop to discuss how to strengthen the participation of local communities within the climate process. In Busan, the forthcoming 48th session of the World Heritage Committee will take up the follow-up to the Nairobi process on African heritage authenticity and open avenues for participation by Indigenous representatives.

These are not equivalent processes. But they share the same dispute. What happens when knowledge, memories and territorial practices enter institutions designed to turn them into documents, policies, indicators, files and, increasingly, data infrastructures.

Bonn listens, but the 2027 review will show how much changes

The workshop held in Bonn on 12 June was not presented as a major reform of climate governance. Its aim was more precise and, for that very reason, revealing. To identify barriers, experiences and conditions for widening the participation of local communities in the UNFCCC process.

The call itself acknowledges that the debate is tied to a question that remains open. How local communities are represented within the LCIPP and its Facilitative Working Group. The resulting informal report is meant to feed into the group’s review scheduled for 2027.

The issue is not only whether community knowledge should be heard. It is who speaks, on whose behalf, through what mechanisms of representation and with what capacity to influence decisions that later affect concrete territories.

The difference is easier to grasp through a Latin American case.

The 2026 report on the work of the UNFCCC’s constituted bodies mentions the Indigenous milpa of Central America as an example of an agricultural practice that strengthens food security, ecosystems and climate resilience. It also alludes, more broadly, to Indigenous initiatives for resilient food systems in Central and South America aimed at conserving climate-adapted crops.

But that regional wording conceals a far greater social density. A report hosted on the LCIPP’s own platform documents a Ciarena project in Oaxaca with Mixe, Chinantec and Zapotec women and their families. The initiative revived the sowing of native seeds and the rearing of local poultry through ancestral agricultural knowledge, biofertilisers, rainwater harvesting systems and the integrated management of native maize varieties.

The same document translates that experience into countable results. Thirty poultry farms, sixty milpa plots and twenty water collection systems. That conversion is neither irrelevant nor necessarily negative. It allows resources to be justified, results to be shown and a practice to be made visible to public administrations. But it also simplifies a fabric that includes food, kinship, the transmission of knowledge, everyday work, seeds, care and a relationship with the land.

The matter gains another layer when those records circulate through digital infrastructures. The UNFCCC already presents its Climate Data Hub as a tool that applies advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to turn climate information into usable visualisations and interpretations. There is no basis for claiming that the Oaxaca case directly feeds those systems. But there is a basis for noting that climate governance increasingly incorporates environments where information has to be standardised, comparable and processable.

The anthropological question is not about rejecting indicators or digital tools. It is about asking what is left out when a way of life has to present itself as administrable evidence and then circulate through systems that privilege whatever can be classified, measured and recombined.

And that problem is not confined to the language of reports. A recent critique by Ecologistas en Acción recalls that participation takes place under deeply unequal conditions. The organisation denounces the fact that much of civil society arrived weakened by funding cuts, visa restrictions and a smaller media presence, with a particular impact on delegations from Africa and Latin America.

Before asking what knowledge enters a room, it is worth asking who manages to reach it, with how much time, with what resources and with what real chance of sustaining an intervention against far better funded state delegations.

Africa is not asking only for more heritage, but for other ways of defining it

The same tension reappears in African heritage.

The provisional list of documents for the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee includes item 6C, devoted to the report on the 2025 Nairobi Conference and the follow-up on the implementation of the Nairobi Outcome Document. The Busan meeting will not close the debate, but it confirms that the discussion on authenticity has entered the formal agenda of the international heritage system.

What is at stake is not the discovery that communities have a relationship with their heritage. That is self-evident. The question is whether heritage institutions can accept that authenticity does not reduce to original materials, restored façades or architectural criteria defined from outside. The progress report on the Strategy for World Heritage in Africa points to the need to carry those principles over into training, university curricula, professional programmes and processes of inscription, management and monitoring of heritage properties.

That debate arrives at a time when museums and cultural institutions are exploring uses of AI in collection management, accessibility, education and heritage storytelling. The global survey opened by UNESCO and ICOM in 2026 shows that the question is no longer hypothetical.

The tension is clear. A digital representation can widen access, document material fragility and support research. But on its own it is not equivalent to the continuity of a rite, the authority of a community, oral transmission or a living relationship with a landscape.

Bringing in African perspectives on authenticity can challenge heritage models that are excessively monumentalist and Eurocentric. But every institutional incorporation also runs the risk of turning those perspectives into a new technical category, administrable from the very system that previously left them out.

The anthropology of heritage has long shown that to conserve is not only to protect. It is also to classify, authorise, rank and produce value. In this context, digitisation does not replace that dispute. It makes it more intense, because it adds new technical mediations between the community, the archive and the institution.

Busan tests the distance between presence and influence

The next session of the World Heritage Committee will take place in Busan from 19 to 29 July 2026. UNESCO has promoted support for Indigenous representatives to take part in it, recognising that many inscribed or candidate sites are inhabited, managed or affected by Indigenous peoples.

The gesture matters. Direct presence can correct a historical inequality. For too long, heritage institutions have spoken about Indigenous peoples without ensuring that they can intervene on equal terms.

But reaching the room is not the same as directly influencing the decisions taken by States Parties, nor as halting processes that advance through other administrative, economic, political or technological channels.

Taking part can amplify a voice, contribute situated information, question frameworks of interpretation and feed the drafting of proposals. On its own it does not guarantee the capacity to modify a nomination, alter a state file or prevent a heritage decision from following a path that is already consolidated.

The difference seems small, but it is decisive.

Institutions do not only recognise knowledge. They also set the legitimate formats for expressing it. They require reports, maps, translations, categories, documentary evidence and, increasingly, records compatible with digital platforms and infrastructures. Those formats do not always match local ways of transmitting authority, memory or a relationship with the land.

That is why Indigenous and community participation should not be measured only by the number of people invited, the trips funded or the interventions made. We should also ask what capacity those interventions have to modify outcome documents, redefine priorities, contest criteria and shape the data architectures that will order memory and heritage in the future.

Closing

Between Bonn and Busan a common scene takes shape.

Climate and heritage institutions are opening spaces for knowledge and communities that previously remained at the margins. That matters. But opening a door does not on its own resolve the distribution of power within the room, nor within the technical infrastructures that record, order and circulate what is said inside it.

Taking part is not the same as being seen.

The 2027 review of the Facilitative Working Group offers a concrete test. It should not assess only how many people took part, how many workshops were held or how many interventions were recorded. It should also examine the extent to which the contributions of local communities altered the documents, priorities and decisions that came out of those processes, and how they were translated, classified and reused within their information systems.

This is an urgent task for contemporary anthropology. Not to add diversity to institutions that are already closed, but to observe who can transform the rules by which those institutions recognise, classify and govern diversity.

Sources

Bonn, the LCIPP, data and community participation

African heritage, AI and authenticity

Indigenous participation in Busan