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This book examines who really gets to decide the fate of a UNESCO World Heritage City. Drawing on original fieldwork at Old Ahmedabad, India's first UNESCO World Heritage City, it investigates the quality of community participation in cultural heritage governance, revealing a stark gap between the formal architecture of participatory democracy and its practice on the ground.

The book offers a rigorous, evidence-based understanding of why participatory heritage governance fails even where the legal and institutional conditions for it exist. Through a mixed-methods study combining a survey of 400 local stakeholders with 31 in-depth expert interviews, the book maps the formal governance institutions of the walled city, measures community awareness and social capital, and assesses participation levels across fourteen indicators of governance quality and five core values of public participation. It concludes with twenty actionable recommendations grounded in the Ahmedabad evidence and situated within international best practice for moving from tokenistic consultation towards genuine community partnership in heritage decision-making.

This book will be essential reading for scholars and students in heritage studies, urban governance, and South Asian urbanism, as well as heritage conservation practitioners, UNESCO World Heritage Site managers, and policymakers working on cultural heritage, urban planning, and civic participation in India and comparable contexts across Asia.