Realizing the Ecological Value of Transnational Cultural Heritage Corridors: An Adaptive Governance Framework Based on the Silk Road Heritage Ecological Value Fund

Transnational cultural heritage corridors generate benefits through routes, landscapes, communities, ecological settings, and cross-border historical connections, while many conservation and environmental management responsibilities remain localized. This paper treats that mismatch as an institutional governance problem and asks how the ecological value of transnational cultural heritage corridors can be institutionally realized through adaptive governance. Here, ecological value is defined as the environmental and conservation conditions that sustain heritage places; cultural, social, and economic values are analytically distinct, although they interact with ecological value by generating benefits, legitimacy, financing opportunities, and governance demands. Methodologically, this study is a conceptual–institutional design study combining literature synthesis, document-based case grounding, prospective mechanism design, indicator construction, and illustrative institutional simulation. The Chang’an–Tianshan Corridor is examined through official UNESCO and ICOMOS documents covering 2014–2025. The proposed Silk Road Heritage Ecological Value Fund (SRHEVF) and Governance Performance Index (GPI) are therefore design prototypes rather than implemented policy instruments. The simulation uses stylized standardized inputs to compare equal, revenue-based, and responsibility-based allocation rules, as well as to assess how the mechanism behaves under conflicting indicator profiles and alternative weights. This study contributes by shifting attention from heritage value recognition to the institutional conditions required to return dispersed benefits to conservation and ecological governance, while explicitly separating conceptual design, documentary grounding, and illustrative mechanism assessment from empirical policy validation.