That decision is really up to the document type. I think by default most contexts will "derive" from their parent context, but some contexts may override those settings. I am not intimately familiar with the stylesheet you are using so can't give specific advice.
In general, the stylesheets we build here at GPSL tend to have a global default (eg. on <topic>) which derives down to all contexts. It is usually only for special cases that you need to override the widows/orphans settings.