Abstract
The paper addresses sustainability, heritage, management, and communication from UNESCO’s Marine World Heritage (MWH) perspective, analyzing its digital narrative footprint through social media. It aims to understand how MWH is conceptualized, managed, and communicated and whether it is framed with sustainability and biocultural values facilitating interactivity, engagement, and multimodal knowledge. Hence, a content analysis of the Instagram accounts of the MWH of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) sites and protected areas has been conducted. The study included evidence from their Instagram profile, posts, features, and reactions. The findings indicated the dearth of a management and communication strategy being shared among and across UNESCO’s MWH of OUV sites and protected areas, capturing the “lifeworld” and the “voice” of the marine heritage as unified. They also revealed that nature and human, and biological and socio-ecological ecosystems of MWH of OUV sites and protected areas are not interlinked in marine heritage management and communication featuring the whole and the entirety of the marine heritage site ecosystem. The lack of this expansion of meaning and engagement does not facilitate the shift of the route in the marine-scape, from discovery and being listed as World Heritage to human-nature interaction, diversity, dynamicity, and ocean literacy. The study contributes to setting the ground rules for strengthening marine heritage management and communication in light of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Ocean Literacy Decade (2021–2030).
Highlights
UNESCO’s Marine World Heritage (MWH) acknowledges unique marine biodiversity, singular ecosystems, unique geological processes, or incomparable beauty
This paper aims to elaborate on the value and complexity of marine heritage by focusing on UNESCO’s MWH management and communication approaches, and the challenges they face in light of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Decade of Ocean Literacy (2021–2030), and in the era of big data and the semantic web [78,79,80]
Focusing on MWH of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), this paper aims to illuminate the importance of a more holistic and integrated heritage management and communication approach, the sustainable biocultural framing
Summary
UNESCO’s Marine World Heritage (MWH) acknowledges unique marine biodiversity, singular ecosystems, unique geological processes, or incomparable beauty. The marine landscape is more than the blue environment and its beauty. Marine ecology is a result of interaction between all the above ecosystems and landscapes together with human cultural and societal processes. Indicative is the fact that just over 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coast [5]. This dialectic multifold nature and multimodal knowledge of the marine-scape are neglected in the conceptual definitions and academic research. Unlike the marine nature-scape, the maritime cultural and social landscape is poorly observed or incorporated in the sustainable development context and praxis
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