European Cultural Routes and Sustainability: From Policy Frames to Measurable Practice

This article examines how the European Cultural Routes (ECR) programme articulates and implements sustainability as a territorial heritage governance objective. Secondary documents (2010–2025) are analysed using critical discourse analysis with a policy-instrumentation lens to trace how sustainability narratives travel into tools and routines across transnational route networks coordinated by the Council of Europe. Four recurrent strategies are identified: intertextual alignment with global norms, the moral economy of slow mobility, community co-creation, and best-practice evidencing. Building on heritage and spatial governance scholarship, the study proposes a discourse–instrument–practice framework and a coding ladder that distinguishes vision, obligation and public reporting across governance scales. Findings indicate patterns of uneven translation from rhetoric to enforceable instruments and monitoring, with more consistent operationalisation observed in cases where certification and funding conditionalities render tools non-optional. The analysis contributes to spatial development and heritage governance debates by suggesting that ECR sustainability appears to function less as an integrated territorial regime than as a selectively institutionalised governance constellation. The article concludes by specifying enforceable instruments and transparent reporting arrangements that could strengthen the auditability and territorial accountability of sustainability claims.