Community-based methodologies for climate-resilient cultural heritage and sustainable tourism: STECCI project

Climate change poses increasing risks to cultural heritage across Europe, particularly to stone-built monuments and cultural landscapes exposed to changing temperature regimes, altered precipitation patterns, and more frequent extreme weather events. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary approaches that integrate environmental research, heritage science, and societal engagement within local development frameworks.

This paper presents the methodological framework developed within the STECCI project, focusing on community-based approaches for integrating climate-vulnerable cultural heritage into sustainable tourism and local development strategies. STECCI focuses on medieval limestone tombstones (Stećci), a transnational UNESCO World Heritage property located in environmentally sensitive regions of the Western Balkans, where climate-related pressures intersect with social, economic, and governance challenges.

The proposed methodology combines participatory social research, policy analysis, and preliminary economic insights to support evidence-based and inclusive decision-making processes. Central to the approach are Social Labs implemented across five countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, and Germany), which engage local communities, cultural institutions, tourism stakeholders, and public authorities through structured participatory formats. These Social Labs function as spaces for co-creation and cross-sector collaboration, fostering social inclusion and long-term stakeholder engagement.

Rather than generating new large-scale quantitative datasets, the framework emphasizes the systematic synthesis of existing project evidence, including community knowledge, local initiatives, and early economic signals related to heritage valorisation. Collected evidence is thematically clustered across social, economic, and cultural dimensions in order to identify key challenges, policy gaps, and development opportunities for sustainable tourism as a pathway for climate adaptation and heritage resilience.

The paper proposes a transferable, community-centered methodological model that integrates cultural heritage into sustainable tourism development strategies at both local and institutional levels. While grounded in the Western Balkans context, the framework is designed to be adaptable to other climate-sensitive regions facing similar constraints in governance capacity and resource availability.