World Heritage Convention at Fifty Years Old: Shifting to Outstanding Heritage Management Practices

Abstract

World Heritage Convention at Fifty Years Old:Shifting to Outstanding Heritage Management Practices Eugene Jo (bio) and Webber Ndoro (bio) KEYWORDS UNESCO, World Heritage Convention Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The 43rd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting held in Baku, Azerbaijan, 1 Jul 2019. © Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan/M. Ragimov. [End Page 250] The World Heritage label emanates from the 1972 UNESCO Convention. The Convention is the instrument that is mostly used for celebrating the world's heritage, of Outstanding Universal Value. To most governments it is seen as an instrument of recognition and an arena for competition among other countries. As an international convention, its most important decision-making body is the intergovernmental World Heritage Committee. The Committee is formulated of twenty-one States Parties elected at the General Assembly, generally serving for a four-year mandate. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre is the Secretariat to the Convention. Experts, particularly the Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Committee, see the Convention as a tool to better practice the conservation and management of heritage, which is clearly the intention of the 1972 Convention. Much of these Advisory Bodies' discussions can be aligned to what Laurajane Smith has called "the Authorized Heritage Discourse."1 This is the notion of heritage as a professional (expert) vocabulary, which, by determining the rules of the game, determines what heritage is, what heritage is worth protecting, how it should be protected, and for whom.2 In 2021, thirty-four new sites were added to the World Heritage List, and one was removed because of the threats urban development posed to its conservation management (Liverpool–Maritime Mercantile City, UK). With 1,154 sites accumulated on the List over the past fifty years, there is probable cause to assume that at least twenty sites per year will continue to be added in the next decade. The annual meeting held online in July 2021 clearly indicated the current dynamics of the Committee and its various stakeholders, the States Parties of the Committee, the World Heritage Centre (the Secretariat) and the Advisory Bodies to the Committee. The increased politicization of the Committee over the past decade led to the formation of an ad hoc working group to establish a code of conduct. After more than two years of discussions, in 2021 at the Twenty-Third Session of the General Assembly of the World Heritage Convention, the Declaration of Principles to Promote International Solidarity and Cooperation for the Preservation of World Heritage was adopted as a nonbinding text.3 Though the Declaration is meant to apply for all actors involved with the Convention, the discussions were started essentially to address the conduct of States Parties. One illustration of the ongoing political tensions over the past ten years is the Committee's reactions to its Advisory Body's technical recommendations. The Committee has lauded science-based recommendations when they have been in favor of States Parties' interests and has vigorously challenged the legitimacy of those same recommendations when they have not. Although accusations of politicization of the Convention have persisted for [End Page 251] more than a decade, and have been described as detrimental to the credibility of the Committee, the intergovernmental—States Parties—DNA of UNESCO means that the organization and its deliberations will always be inherently political.4 The UNESCO Global Strategy, which calls upon the World Heritage List to be representative, balanced, and credible, is a problematic directive, considering the inherently political nature of the States Parties system.5 It is not clear how the objectives of the strategy are to be achieved: Is it through numbers per country or per region or even per area? What is the yardstick to indicate success or failure? UNESCO's own program Priority Africa cannot be judged apolitical. It is important for UNESCO to recognize that political issues will always dominate its deliberations. Hence, rather than denigrating the political nature of the Committee, the World Heritage Centre (WHC) needs to play a more active diplomatic role as Secretariat in ensuring that contentious issues between the States Parties and the Advisory Bodies are resolved prior to and between Committee meetings. This...