Reviving Sacred Metalwork: Co-Production and the Market Failure of Intangible Heritage in Southern Thailand

Across southeast Asia, intangible craft traditions are disappearing as ageing practitioners retire without successors. Yet the social, spiritual, and identity values they carry often far exceed what markets alone can sustain. This paper develops and tests a multi-stakeholder framework for deciding which endangered crafts most warrant public support, drawing on market failure analysis while remaining grounded in heritage community realities. We applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process with four expert assessors to rank eleven craft categories in Nakhon Si Thammarat Province, Thailand. Buddhist metal offerings—tied to Wat Phra Mahathat Woramahawihan, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2026 as Thailand’s first southern World Heritage Site—emerged as the highest priority. We then tested a co-production intervention, positioning the research team as facilitator rather than provider. The results were striking: 216 donors from across Thailand and abroad contributed THB 909,999 in private funds against just THB 107,000 in project support, and 61 per cent came from outside the local province. These findings suggest endangered traditions can harbour substantial latent demand that markets fail to capture, and that co-production offers a promising pathway for mobilising community resources while reducing dependence on public subsidy.