UNESCO World Heritage and State Agendas

UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Agendas of States

• Heritage is emphasized by UNESCO, the tourist industry, and national governments.
• Heritage was a key concept in campaigns to protect the environment in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to UNESCO's World Heritage Convention in 1972.
• Heritage has been institutionalized and commercialized, acting as a label for the valued past, and given endangered or outmoded cultural production a "second life".
• UNESCO is a global instrument that mobilizes resources, reproduces arguments, establishes agendas, and grants status to conservation efforts.
• UNESCO aims to counter globalization by expanding cultural programs.
• UNESCO promotes "good" globalization through protection of tangible and intangible cultural heritage via protocols, declarations, and inventories.
• UNESCO's "World Heritage" has become a source of reliance for tourism and cultural industries, becoming part of a global system that projects a world image and activates a world economy.
• The heritage movement, as adopted by UNESCO, has roots in internationalism, romanticism, the Enlightenment, and intellectual cooperation across borders.
• UNESCO's supporters may be critical of the institution's programs, as it questions their good intentions and founding principles.
• UNESCO has not overcome nation-state power structures and nationalist agendas.
• Global mobilization may reinforce nationalism; An example of this is the conflict between Thailand and Cambodia following the nomination of the Preah Vihear temple to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in early 2008.
• UNESCO's influence lies in its role of assigning "World Heritage" status
• The World Heritage Convention, while binding, does not override domestic laws, serving as "non-binding political or moral ideals".
• UNESCO's power in heritage is in normative pressure and symbolic capital for various groups.
• UNESCO aims to establish the legitimacy of World Heritage sites and the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
• These lists also serve as status symbols in nation-state competition.
• UNESCO's World Cultural Heritage program is a creation of member states and specialists.
• Treaty-style conventions mirror the UN in making states key actors.
• The technical-normative and administrative systems managed by UNESCO coordinate actors and authorize concepts.
• The World Heritage List endorses conservation and grants recognition.
• UNESCO's professionals reproduce their status and legitimacy.
• Core administrators perpetuate the myth of global unity through heritage conservation.
• UNESCO's internationalist goals are undermined by parochialism at the state level.
• Member states use heritage site nominations for cultural hegemony and nationalism, as well as tourism.
• Nation-states utilize global systems more than being eclipsed by them.
• Competition for cultural capital is evident in contests like the Nobel Prize and Olympic Games.
• Ulrich Beck's hope for transnational networks superseding nation-state competition is unrealistic.

UNESCO and Globalization

• World heritage sites are utilized by nation-states for pragmatic goals.
• The heritage system persists due to its symbolic functions for key players.
• UNESCO strategically uses "global" and "globalization" to establish its goals.
• "Globalization" is generally viewed as negative, while UNESCO aims to be a benevolent global entity separate from globalization.
• UNESCO aims to champion diversity against globalisation.
• UNESCO aims to defend cultures.
• UNESCO highlights a focus on ‘culture’ and reflects the new salience of ‘culture' in a post-Cold War world order.
• UNESCO’s leitmotiifs became ‘peacemaking’ and the promotion of global 'justice' in the 1990s.
• UNESCO is within global integration through Ulrich Beck's view of ‘globality'.
• Globalisation is irreversible due to networking, trade, images, and human rights.
• UNESCO operates within global interconnection, governance, and movements.
• UNESCO claims to speak for the world and generate symbols for normative values.
• UNESCO's "globalization" of heritage has been scrutinized by conservationists and academics.
• Considering the relationship that exists between UNESCO, the constitution of heritage, and global power is important.

UNESCO's Influence

• William S. Logan considers whether UNESCO's role mirrors that of global organizations imposing policies from the 'centre' onto 'periphery' societies.
• Logan acknowledges UNESCO's global preservation mission while questioning cultural globalization.
• UNESCO's advisory groups, ICOMOS and ICCROM, continue to dictate international standards in the cultural heritage arena.
• UNESCO and related organizations impose a common cultural stamp, creating global uniformity.
• This matrix has influenced conservation by improving international practice, imposing standardization, and providing programs.
• Heritage values and conservation practices are promoted.
• Management practices are established in World Heritage sites.
• It appears to be uniformity of a highly technical order, also involving categorization and interpretation of sites.
• UNESCO has progressively assimilated alternative approaches from the ‘periphery'.
• The Nara Document on Authenticity (1994), affirmed that conservation practice needs to reflect the cultural values of particular societies.
• Logan states, it is no longer acceptable to provide a single answer to how heritage is identified and saved.
• Logan welcomes these trends, and concludes that UNESCO has actively accommodated change.
• UNESCO is committed to proliferation of types of authorised heri tage by challenging the capacity of organisations and professionals to effectively protect and manage this Pandora’s Box.
• The political uses of heritage listing among nation-states is acknowledged too.
• Logan is both committed to necessity of UNESCO's global conservation management project, with a pragmatic view about the intrusion of politics into these processes.
• The proliferation of new forms of heritage that have emerged under UNESCO's stewardship over the past two decades is considered.
• Logan concludes that UNESCO’s progressive accommodation of heritage diversity implicitly responds to a somewhat early judgement, before 1996, that UNESCO and ICOMOS ‘have not hitherto operated in a globally unbiased fashion appropriate to even handed representation of the heritage of mankind'.

Critiques of UNESCO

• Tunbridge and Ashworth charted the emergence and multifarious applications of heritage to discuss dangerous consequences regarding economic exploitation, distortion and trivialisation, and ideological manipulation by elites.
• Identifying UNESCO and its affiliated professional associations as the principal actors in global heritage affairs, a positive note suggests, these agencies may facilitate ‘international heritage reconciliation' involving restitution of property damaged or stolen in wars.
• Heritage Sites in the Third World demonstrates a tendency for these sites to be used as instruments of national aggrandisement by more or less developed countries, potentially adding to international heritage tensions.
• UNESCO is a powerful actor, reflecting the propositions of some scholars that a ‘World Polity' or 'World Society' is a key feature of the con temporary era .
• UNESCO goes further, arguing that UNESCO is ‘a powerful producer of culture, and a highly influential actor, capable of defining and framing conditions, problems, and solutions, and thus framing the interests and desired actions of others, especially those of the world's nation-states'.
• The official determinations of the ‘World Heritage' status of various sites have a substantive role in producing uniformity in the meaning of ‘heritage' across the globe.
• The bureaucratic units within UNESCO possess the power not simply to mobilise a wide range of groups towards the technical objectives of material conservation and restoration, but that they also actively shape the meanings of particular historic sites through a representational process.
• UNESCO is both a power ‘centre’ and capable of producing a hegemonic model of cultural significance. He argues that, as a globalising project, ‘World Heritage' involves global standar dising and regulating processes and measures.
• Many would argue that ‘World Heritage' is simply a pan-national category that recognises and celebrates remarkable human creations
• World Heritage is; a cosmopolitan political project', which aims to create a new political as well as imagined community
• The criteria for UNESCO's World Heritage Centre in evaluating cultural and natural sites is problematic, exclusionary, or suppressive.
• It is a project which is idealistic and reformatory in aims, but also 'highly pragmatic, contradictory, and sometimes hypocritical in practice'.
• ‘World Heritage' is a type of universalising grammar of rationalist modernity that changes local perceptions and realities.
• UNESCO generates essentialised concepts in association with the concept of ‘uni versal value'.
• Specialists identify in groups - the ‘righteous providers of scientific knowledge’ are the producers and authorising agents of this idea.
• The creation of the World Heritage system involves comparison between sites to rate their value on a hierarchy through the application of a ‘global grammar'.
• Not all sites are equally valuable represented in the World Heritage list but the concept of ‘outstanding universal value' requires selection and evaluation on the basis that some things are more important than others.
• The criteria for selection have in fact been subject to debate and change, and since the late 1980s UNESCO's heritage bureaucracy responded to pressures from UNESCO's assembly to widen the number of listed sites and make the list more representative of its member states.
• There had been a change in the definition and application of the principle of ‘outstanding universal value' from listing ‘the best of the best' (‘iconic' or unique sites) to listing ‘representative of the best', the latter being a reflection of the necessity for comparison due to the surge in the number of nominated sites of similar character.
• 1994 - a ‘Global Strategy’ mandated broad and 'dynamic' categories of universal application designed to accommodate diverse and complex sites, including cultural landscapes, industrial sites, modern architecture, and inhabited settlements.
• There was an increase in hybrid sites from Southeast Asia that began to be listed, in the 1990s, reflecting the impress of European colonialism.
• UNESCO's conservation has been seen as cursed by the success of the World Heritage program.
• Nation states have embraced World Heritage for their own purposes, due to the flexibility of UNESCO.
• The specialists and their bureaucratic processes are a source of power, but do not fully acknowledge the limits to this power.
• Specialists classify the significance and meanings of sites on a scale of 'heritage values', but aren't in control of the meanings of sites at the national and sub national level.
• UNESCO is a forum of states where bureaucrats and specialists have to respond to them, and change accordingly.
• UNESCO establishes a terrain for competition among states, and UNESCO’s lists have become indispensable to nations' global visibility and status.
• UNESCO is portrayed as a power regime by critics of world heritage.
• Heritage is not found, but is made.
• Dynamic phenomena is made inert due to the view promoted in AHD “Authorized Heritage Discourse" that heritage is innately valuable.
• UNESCO and ICOMOS are that have institutionalised a dominant heritage discourse and perpetuated it through technical and policy processes

Case Studies

• James Hevia identifies UNESCO as a complicit agent in cultural homogenization in China.
• UNESCO did not comment on the practice in China of the symbolic incorporation of minority groups, apparently.
• UNESCO avoids any comment on the symbolic incorporation of minority groups in China.
• In Fez's preservation, the Moroccan Ministry stressed that the plan aimed not to conserve buildings, but to reinstate the site as 'an ensemble of the social, economic, cultural and religious life that made the particular genius of the medina'.
• There has been a general process of relocation for residents of rural origin out of Medina.
• Fez authorities claim to relocate rural origin in “urban redevelopment.
• There were French colonial eva luations and orientalist scholarships that were heavily submitted to support the World Heritage nomination UNESCO has, it appears, avoided any comment on this process of incorporation of minority groups in China.
• The bestowment of World Heritage site status enhanced Thailand's packaging of their culture and history.
• UNESCO acts as one of the many actors authorising and shaping repre sentations of the past; however the major forces resisted hegemonic renderings of Thailand's past which has united intellectuals and academics who rallied not against UNESCO, but a number of key state agencies.
• Buddhist temples at Chengde has attracted pilgrims and reactivated some popular folk devotional practices, including offerings to deities, planting of prayer flags, and piling of inscribed stones as mem orials

Dynamics of particular Historic Sites

• UNESCO's CO's role at Swayambhu is minimal.
• UNESCO conservation plans appear to be ineffective in managing new constructions.
• There is not one single 'com munity' to interpret swayambhu which acts as a constituency; but rather there are many groups.
• Studies of World Heritage indicates most often the end product of a longer history of conservation projects.
• UNESCO's author ization of World Heritage can animated by agenda's, involving physical and symbolic exclusion.
• Many of the conflicts over the meaning of the past isn't captured through World hertiage sites however .
• Internal debates and negative impact on communities of the city are controversial for UNESCO deliberation.

Conclusion

• The World Heritage List is both a technical and iconic status-conferring arte fact; that works simultaniously to serive and legitimase UNESCO's disctinive interest and expert and nation.
• UNESCO's World Heritage List enhances legitimacy through; universal and politisised.
• Maintaining and governing entry to the List, endows the specalists ICOMOS with import legitimacy.
• UNESCO aims its theWorld Heritage list for iconic significance among states.
• World Heriage, can also achive member state that allows income.
• It is difficult to impose the ‘universal' .
• UNESCO maintains that the organisation is a multi-dimensional entity .
• As the umpire and accomplice in the global status game of heritage listing, UNESCO is a complicit partner in nation-states' domestic projects of cultural reification.