How Diplomats and Folklorists Shaped the Global Definition of Intangible Cultural Heritage: An Insider’s View

Introduction: The Unseen Battles Behind Intangible Heritage

When the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted in 2003, it was celebrated as a landmark moment for cultural diversity. For the first time, oral traditions, performing arts, rituals, festive events, and traditional craftsmanship were formally recognized on the global stage as worthy of protection—alongside monuments, buildings, and archaeological sites. Yet behind the celebrations, a far more contentious story unfolded. The road to 2003 was paved with fierce negotiations over ownership, value, and definition. Who actually controls the rights to folklore? Whose knowledge should be safeguarded, and on whose terms? And how did centuries-old academic debates about the nature of “tradition” end up codified as international law?

[IMAGE: Photo of Hafstein at a UNESCO meeting or a still from the film 'The Condor's Flight'.]

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, a folklorist at the University of Iceland, is uniquely positioned to answer these questions. Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hafstein sat on both sides of the table: as a member of Iceland’s delegation to UNESCO’s intergovernmental meetings on intangible heritage, and as a representative of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) on the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. His dual role gave him an insider’s view of how diplomats, legal experts, and folklorists—often speaking different languages—collaborated and collided to produce the global framework we now take for granted. His 2018 book Making Heritage: UNESCO and the Cultural Politics of Preservation, along with a recent Library of Congress blog post (July 3, 2018), traces that arc from the late 1980s to the 2003 Convention, revealing the hidden economic logic that continues to shape how we value living traditions today.

The Birth of a Category: ICH as a Joint UNESCO-WIPO Creation

The concept of “intangible cultural heritage” did not emerge from a single disciplinary insight or a sudden policy epiphany. Rather, it was born out of a collaborative—and often tense—partnership between two international organizations: UNESCO, focused on cultural safeguarding, and WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, concerned with preventing the misappropriation of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions. In the late 1980s, as globalization accelerated and indigenous communities began demanding greater control over their own heritage, both organizations recognized that existing legal instruments were insufficient. Copyright law, designed for individual authors and fixed works, could not accommodate collectively held, orally transmitted, and continuously evolving folklore. Patent law, meanwhile, was ill-equipped to handle traditional medicinal knowledge developed over generations.

[IMAGE: Infographic timeline: Late 1980s – early cooperation; 2003 – Convention adoption; 2018 – book/film release.]

The cooperation began informally. UNESCO’s 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore was an early, non-binding attempt to encourage states to document and preserve folklore. But it lacked enforcement mechanisms, and it framed folklore primarily as a resource to be collected—much like the 19th-century salvage paradigm that Hafstein, as a folklorist, knows well. Meanwhile, WIPO began to explore how intellectual property might protect traditional knowledge from unauthorized commercial use. By the mid-1990s, the two organizations were holding joint meetings, and the term “intangible cultural heritage” started to replace the older, more academic “folklore.” This terminological shift was not innocent: it signaled a move from the academic study of folk culture to a policy-driven concern with heritage as something to be managed, governed, and—critically—owned.

The tension was baked in from the start. UNESCO’s mandate emphasized safeguarding cultural diversity, promoting mutual respect, and ensuring that communities could continue to practice their traditions. WIPO, by contrast, was concerned with the economic dimensions: preventing biopiracy, ensuring that indigenous groups could benefit financially from their knowledge, and creating legal mechanisms to stop corporations from patenting traditional remedies without consent. The fundamental question was never fully resolved: Is intangible heritage a public good for all humanity, or a form of property belonging to specific communities? That ambiguity—what Hafstein calls “the productive friction between safeguarding and property”—became the engine of two decades of diplomatic negotiations.

Where Diplomacy Met Folklore: Inside the Committee Rooms

Hafstein recalls spending “entire days in WIPO meetings given over to how to define ‘folklore’.” This might sound like academic navel-gazing, but the stakes were concrete. If folklore is defined as “tradition-based creations of a community,” does it include contemporary adaptations? Can a single individual hold rights to a folk song that has been sung for centuries? Should protection extend to digital expressions, such as a remix of a traditional melody? Every word carried legal implications. Delegates from common-law countries (the United States, the United Kingdom) favored narrow, property-like definitions; those from civil-law traditions (France, Germany) preferred broader, cultural-rights-based approaches. And representatives from the Global South, where much traditional knowledge originates, pushed for strong protections against misappropriation, often clashing with developed countries that wanted to keep cultural expressions freely available for tourism, entertainment, and research.

[IMAGE: Black-and-white photo of a crowded UN meeting room with delegates raising hands, or a sketch of diplomats and scholars debating around a table.]

Hafstein’s dual role gave him a rare vantage point. At UNESCO, he was part of Iceland’s official delegation, which meant he had to navigate the formal protocols of state diplomacy—drafting interventions, building coalitions, and negotiating compromise language. At WIPO, he sat as an NGO representative, speaking for the scholarly community of folklorists and ethnologists. This position allowed him to inject academic insights into the legal process, but it also exposed the uncomfortable truth that many of the debates being waged in the committee rooms were recycled from over 150 years of folklore scholarship. The same arguments about authenticity, authorship, and community that had animated 19th-century theorists like the Brothers Grimm—who debated whether folktales were collective creations or the work of individual storytellers—were now being recast as policy positions. “The diplomats didn’t know they were channeling old academic disputes,” Hafstein notes in his book. “But they were.”

The hidden pattern became clear: the definition of folklore was not a neutral academic exercise. It was a struggle over whose cultural expressions would be recognized, whose would be left out, and who would have the authority to speak for a community. The 2003 Convention ultimately chose a broad, inclusive definition of intangible cultural heritage—practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as part of their heritage. But that definition left many questions unresolved, particularly around commercial use and digital reproduction. These questions would later resurface in WIPO’s ongoing negotiations, which remain deadlocked to this day.

The 2003 Convention: A Milestone with Invisible Trade-offs

The adoption of the UNESCO Convention in 2003 was a diplomatic triumph. It established intangible cultural heritage as a legitimate category of global concern, alongside the tangible heritage protected by the 1972 World Heritage Convention. The convention outlined five broad domains: oral traditions and expressions; performing arts; social practices, rituals, and festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and traditional craftsmanship. States that ratified the convention agreed to take measures to identify, document, preserve, and promote their intangible heritage, and to engage communities in these efforts.

But the celebratory narrative obscures the trade-offs that were made. One of the most significant was the decision to exclude certain types of cultural expressions from the convention’s purview. Digital expressions—remixes, mashups, online adaptations of traditional music or stories—were not included, largely because they raised intellectual property issues that UNESCO did not want to wade into. Similarly, the convention avoided addressing the commercial exploitation of heritage, focusing instead on “safeguarding” as a public good. This meant that a traditional dance could be inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List, gaining prestige and tourism dollars, while the community that created it might have no legal recourse if a corporation used that dance in a commercial film or a fashion show without permission.

[IMAGE: A photo of a traditional craftsperson working, with a UNESCO logo in the background, or a split image showing a village festival and a luxury boutique selling inspired designs.]

The invisible trade-off is what Hafstein calls “the market pattern”: the same heritage that is formally safeguarded is also systematically commodified in global markets. UNESCO’s lists have become powerful branding tools. Cities and regions compete to have their festivals, cuisines, and crafts recognized, knowing that inscription can boost tourism and local economies. But the benefits are unevenly distributed. Large corporations can repackage traditional motifs into mass-produced goods without compensating the originating communities. The 2003 Convention does not prevent this; it merely encourages states to “ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups, and individuals that create, maintain, and transmit such heritage.” The language is aspirational, not enforceable.

This tension between safeguarding and commodification is not a flaw of the convention—it is built into its DNA. As Hafstein’s work demonstrates, the very concept of intangible cultural heritage was shaped by a hidden economic logic that dates back to the UNESCO-WIPO partnership. The convention is a milestone, but it is also a compromise. It elevated living traditions to global status, but it did so within a neoliberal framework that treats heritage as a resource to be managed, curated, and—increasingly—monetized. The result is a paradoxical system: we celebrate cultural diversity while embedding it in market logic.

Conclusion: The Ongoing Negotiation

More than two decades after the 2003 Convention, the definitions and frameworks forged in those committee rooms continue to shape international cultural policy. The debates over traditional knowledge at WIPO are still unresolved; the gap between safeguarding and property rights remains wide. Hafstein’s insider account reminds us that what we call “intangible cultural heritage” is not a natural category but a political achievement—the product of countless hours of debate, compromise, and sometimes, productive friction. The folklorists brought historical depth and critical insight; the diplomats brought legal precision and geopolitical calculation. Together, they turned academic arguments into global currency.

Today, when we watch a UNESCO-inscribed festival or hear a government official speak about the need to protect indigenous knowledge, we should remember the unseen battles behind those words. The definition of folklore was never just a question of semantics. It was—and remains—a question of power, ownership, and survival in a world where culture is both a treasure and a commodity.