UNESCO, World Heritage, and State Agendas

UNESCO, World Heritage, and State Agendas

• UNESCO includes the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the global tourist industry, and national governments.
• UNESCO aims to mitigate the destructive effects of globalisation, especially the commodification and homogenization of culture by capitalist industries.
• Globally and institutionally, the heritage system hasn't overcome nation-state power structures and nationalist agendas, but rather enhanced them.
• This enhancement compromises the ideal of creating a meta-national zeitgeist through 'World Heritage'.
• UNESCO's influence on heritage signification is limited by weak formal legal powers.
• The World Heritage Convention's conservation obligations do not override domestic laws or state sovereignty.
• These obligations effectively become 'non-binding political or moral ideals'.
• The power in the global heritage system lies with the nation-state, not global institutions.
• UNESCO's World Cultural Heritage program acts as a tool of member states and their agendas.
• Member states use the nomination process to promote their domestic agendas and state nationalism, as well as generate tourism income.

Global Cultural Competition and UNESCO

• Nations compete for global cultural and political capital through events like the Nobel Prize and the Olympic Games.
• This competition is evident in the usage of UNESCO’s World Heritage List and its list of ‘intangible heritage’.
• The desire for global recognition has caused an increase in World Heritage listed sites over the past decade.
• The term ‘cultural diversity’ is no longer tenable because of globalisation.
• UNESCO staff and ICOMOS specialists believe they are outside the homogenising effects of globalisation.
• This belief is because they view globalisation as capitalist market-driven homogenisation and cultural commodification.
• There are 'bad' and 'responsible' forms of institutionally guided globalisation.
• William S. Logan considers UNESCO's global mission of preservation.
• Logan is concerned that UNESCO's global heritage system imposes homogeneous ‘cultural globalisation’ onto the non-Western world regarding preservation and interpretation.
• Logan states UNESCO may be imposing a common stamp on cultures globally, creating global cultural uniformity with its policies.
• Logan cites 'The Nara Document on Authenticity' (1994), issued by UNESCO and ICOMOS, which asserts that conservation practice reflects cultural values.
• An instance of conservation practice would be East Asia's values placed on symbolism, requiring continued reconstruction of religious monuments rather than pure preservation.
• Logan cites the progressive acceptance of ‘intangible heritage’ as UNESCO accommodating alternative heritage forms into its global lexicon.
• States manipulate heritage, posing a challenge to global amity through heritage conservation programs.

The World Heritage Category and Its Implications

• The World Heritage category produced a paradoxical relationship between dispersed phenomena.
• These phenomena shared something in common and formed the "World Heritage of humankind".
• The World Heritage system standardizes classification through the nomination process.
• The nomination process involves comparing sites to rank their value using a ‘global grammar’.
• This 'global grammar' can reinterpret local sites as world heritage, giving them new meaning within a global framework and perspective.
• This process may be wrongheaded because local meanings may be leeched out or distorted while being elevated to a global list.
• Furthermore, this may perpetuate an uneven ranking of importance among different nations.
• 'World Heritage' has created a terrain of competition among states, and its lists provide global visibility and status for nations.
• Heritage is made, not found: present-day cultural processes determine the value of sites like Stonehenge or the Sydney Opera House.
• The power to define the past's meaning and selectively construct it to support power regimes has been debated in academia and heritage studies.

The Use and Impact of Heritage

• Heritage is used to construct, reconstruct, and negotiate identities, social values, cultural values, and meanings in the present.
• Smith identifies UNESCO's focus on classification, but argues that this overstates its effects, specifically underestimating how nation-states use heritage sites to undermine UNESCO's universalising views.
• UNESCO's discursive power diminishes the importance of its changing criteria for significance and the increased access to the World Heritage List over the last two decades.
• The problems with UNESCO include its bureaucratic processes and focus on list making.
• Contentions regarding global heritage focus on UNESCO’s lists, how they are made, and who controls them.
• UNESCO's lists have irreversibly defined the terrain and stakes of the contests, so the alternative would be to opt out of the global heritage game.
• The UK's successful nomination of Liverpool as a World Heritage Site (2004) indicates heritage classifications being used as a status symbol for economic regeneration.
• National conservation policy and the state's interest in tourism-generated income and national narratives are related.
• Maurizio Peleggi connects Thai agencies' conservation efforts to defining 'Thainess' by framing an authorized version of Thailand's history.
• UNESCO has limited direct presence on the ground, and its management is mediated through national and regional bureaucracies.
• UNESCO's authorization of World Heritage status is often the result of long-term conservation projects at national and regional levels.
• These projects have varied agendas and exclude certain groups physically and symbolically.
• National level remains the critical level for framing heritage policies and discourses.
• Practical and symbolic consequences are contested among people and their own bureaucracies, so subversive histories do not emerge through a state-centred nomination process.
• UNESCO is a complicit partner in nation-states’ projects of cultural reification and domination.

Glocalization of Heritage Through Tourism

• There, a new, ever-increasing speed, intensity, and extent of travel and tourism emerged.
• Heritage tourism serves political purposes in addition to economic incentives.
• Cultural heritage is used domestically to promote pride in national history or highlight ideologies.
• Heritage sites are marketed as iconic markers of a local area, country, region, or continent in the supranational sphere.
• Cultural heritage management is now a strategic tool for maximizing heritage within the global tourism market.
• Conservation and preservation, alongside managing tourism, are major issues for cultural heritage.
• Central Java, Indonesia illustrates general trends and highlights the need for dialogue and collaboration between heritage management and tourism.
• Transnational tourism and (neoliberal) globalization have a striking complicity and circularity.
• Tourism development has instrumental in globalizing heritage, its management, interpretation, and appropriation.
• Tourism instruments of standardisation and control have developed internationally and become increasingly pervasive.
• Promotion of standardized services goes against tourist desires for diversity, and negates cultural and geographic diversity.

Tourism, Heritage, and Local Culture

• Globalisation, with tourism being a main component, homogenizes habits and landscapes globally.
• The remaining aspects of the past are iconicized as tourist attractions, symbolizing national identity.
• Heritage endows peoples and places with a ‘unique selling point’ in marketing.
• The global increase in tourism is pressuring many heritage sites.
• Communities involved and affected confront complex issues including authenticity, interpretation, heritage contestation, social exclusion, contested space, heritage control and preservation.
• Glocalisation directs attention to the institutions and power relations through which globalisation and localisation are made possible.
• Impoverished countries struggle to achieve the international standard for the tourism sector.
• Numerous issues in the less-developed world create everyday obstacles to heritage's sustainable development and management.
• The global ecumene saw expansive tourism growth after World War II, promoting a shared heritage.
• UNESCO's list promotes international visitor numbers as well as safeguarding heritage.
• Many sites are lacking trained personnel and skilled policy makers to effectively use tourism for sustainable development.
• ICOMOS adopted its International Cultural Tourism Charter in 1999, detailing the importance of managing tourism at heritage sites.
• Top-down heritage planning and management disempowers local people, promoting national culture over local culture.
• This freezes sites, displacing human activities and excluding local people from their own heritage.
• Global heritage policies are based on a Western-centric network that are increasingly contested.
• Universal heritage privileges Western ideas and culture.
• There is little place for specific cultural, political, or religious positions that differ from Western, secularist viewpoints in the discourse of universal heritage.
• Tourism is seen as a major tool for development, though this can erase local practices.
• Heritage always requires interpretation and is (re)constructed and contested.
• Societies filter heritage through a value system that changes across time, space, and society.
• Alternative heritage readings risk being subsumed by universalist assertions in global heritage tourism.
• Local tour guides mediate the tension between global standardization and local differentiation.
• Highly trained heritage guides assist tourists and the local community by promoting culturally sensitive behavior and respect for local traditions.
• The Yogyakarta area's cultural heritage has shaped (international) images of Indonesia.
• Government uses structures such as temples, sultan's palace and art like the Ramayana dance to promote Indonesian tourism.
• Sites like Sangiran, Prambanan, and Borobudur are UNESCO World Heritage sites while Sukuh temple or the Sultan's Palace are not yet included.
• The central government in Jakarta proposes sites to UNESCO.
• It’s in the government's strategic interest to nominate politically ‘safe’ monuments.
• Sukuh, being the only known erotic temple on Java, wouldn't be promoted due to the sensibilities of the majority Muslim population.
• WHS is a product of agency at the national level, which serves as a reminder of the politics of heritage.
• Coherent, sustainable heritage management is yet to be fully developed.
• Heritage interpretation and (re)presentation is played by local tour guides.
• Globalisation and localisation are intertwined, and this glocalisation transforms culture through tourism and other channels.