Priyasa Banerjee

Heritage as Governance: Cultural Stewardship and the Intergenerational Imperative in the Post-Declaration Era

The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on Future Generations on 25 September 2024 marks an inflection point in the normative architecture of intergenerational responsibility. Although the Declaration is not a treaty and does not create new binding international legal obligations, it articulates a normative and institutional framework that pledges Member States to integrate the interests of present and future generations into decision-making. This article develops the Heritage Stewardship Continuum (HSC), an analytical framework that connects cultural stewardship, intergenerational responsibility, and temporal governance horizons, and applies it to the Global Repository for Ancient Cultural Endeavours (GRACE) as an illustrative institutional case. Building on the scholarship of Giorgallis (2024) on cultural heritage and future generations, the article positions GRACE's stated preservation, transmission, documentation, certification, and restitution functions within the Declaration's normative commitments on cultural diversity, cultural heritage, and Indigenous Peoples. A GRACE–HSC–Declaration crosswalk is offered to make the analytical relationship explicit, and a restorative-justice domain is theoretically justified as a stewardship function linking historical dispossession to intergenerational repair. The HSC temporal horizons (0–25, 25–100, and 100+ years) are proposed analytical horizons rather than empirically established universal planning periods. The contribution lies in synthesising an integrated analytical lens for heritage governance in the post-Declaration era, not in claiming empirical validation or first-mover novelty.