Unpacking the institutional and psychological pathways of community empowerment in cultural heritage governance

Community empowerment is widely recognized as an effective strategy for improving resident satisfaction in the governance of cultural heritage sites. However, existing studies focus primarily on institutional design and do not systematically explore the underlying psychological conversion mechanisms. To fill this gap, this paper selects Baisha Ancient Town and Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village as cases, uses Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze data from 775 completed questionnaires, and explores the mediating effect of empowerment on residents’ satisfaction through cultural pride and community resilience.

The results show that community empowerment not only directly promotes satisfaction, but also has significant indirect effects through emotional and institutional pathways, and the two show differences in different communities. Through unpacking the “institutional empowerment-psychological response-satisfaction feedback” process, this study contributes to theory by clarifying the synergistic roles of emotional and structural mechanisms and their contextual variations. Practically, it provides a governance framework that helps policymakers calibrate empowerment strategies to community development stages, thereby promoting both cultural continuity and socio-economic sustainability.

This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number: 72204113 and 72401138). School of Civil Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China School of Civil Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, 210037, China Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Umeå, 90187, Sweden School of Management, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin, 300382, China The authors declare no competing interests. This study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of the School of Civil Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University (Approval Number: NJFU-SCE-EC-20250116-01; Approval Date: January 16, 2025).

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To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Liu, Y., Li, W., Cui, P. et al. Unpacking the institutional and psychological pathways of community empowerment in cultural heritage governance.