The new emphasis upon cultural heritage as a development resource among policy bodies has been taken up by multilateral institutions, state law, NGOs, and local government bodies. Many scholars are critical of the new governmentalities that such neoliberal heritage regimes engender, and point to their depoliticizing impacts upon communities and other “stakeholders.” Critical heritage studies, we suggest, must go further still in understanding the range of policy actors and objectives in which cultural heritage management is now situated. Drawing on ethnographic research involving corporate actors, indigenous peoples, and emerging brokers, we suggest that international heritage institutions face new challenges that pose limits to the emancipatory expectations we should have for heritage, which is certain to become repoliticized in rights‐based struggles on resource frontiers.