Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage to Facilitate a Transition towards Sustainability : A Case Study of Tibet's Tourism Industry

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to give suggestions for how to preserve intangible cultural heritage (ICH) towards sustainability. We will use Tibet as a case study. Understanding the importance of ICH for tourism, we scrutinize ICH through the lens of strategic sustainable development (SSD) and use tourism as a leverage point to enter into a real life situation. ICH is the root of all cultural expression. Without guarding ICH there is little meaning to the physical culture that remains and, ultimately, tourism declines. ICH is a new topic and there is little research and few ideas as to how to guide its preservation. We offer recommendations which include identifying the stakeholders, educating them, adequate marketing research especially in tourism, investing on technology of dematerialization and searching substitutions under the guidelines of the Golden Rule within the social sustainability context. Our contributions is to build a vision of success for preserving Tibetan ICH via tourism within the constraints of the four sustainability principles, and then demonstrate some prioritized actions in order to develop towards sustainability.