<![CDATA[Religious-heritage tourism sites are sacred spaces and informal economic ecosystems at once, yet how informal workers sustain their livelihoods under shifting site governance remains poorly understood. This study aims to identify workers’ livelihood resilience strategies and to examine how site governance enables or constrains them. A qualitative, descriptive multi-site case study was conducted at eight religious-cultural tourism sites in Medan, Indonesia, between September 2025 and June 2026. Data came from semi-structured interviews, direct observation, visual documentation, and document review. Informants were selected through purposive sampling with snowball referral, and data were analyzed through thematic coding under Lincoln and Guba’s trustworthiness criteria. Across the eight sites, three strategies recur: seniority-based informal tenure, adaptive concealment and mobility, and formal incorporation into managed vending zones. Site managers respond through tacit tolerance, active relocation, or formal incorporation. None provides structured capital, training, or social protection, and hired vending workers remain largely invisible to governance. Livelihood-resilience theory identifies buffer capacity and self-organization, but learning capacity is absent; workers persist without transforming, and governance protects the sacred core while leaving the surrounding buffer zone weakly managed. The study offers a livelihood-resilience framework linking worker strategies to governance arrangements in sacred-heritage settings. It implies that site managers should formalize access criteria and expand social protection and skills training, especially for hired workers, through inclusive, just-transition-oriented governance, and it proposes a staged plan to implement this.]]>
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