Sites Unseen

Current Issues in Tourism, Vol. 7, Nos. 4&5, 2004, Dunedin

What do Belgium’s Neolithic flint mines, Cambodia’s ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, and New York’s Statue of Liberty have in common? Each can be found on the World Heritage List, often called a contemporary version of the Seven Wonders of the World. As such, they are supposedly safeguarded as part of humanity’s heritage. But exactly which part of humanity is open to debate.

The list was born in 1972 with the passage of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Since then, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has served as keeper of the list. Not surprisingly, most countries are very eager to see their best-known monuments or natural parks make the cut. But, in the early years of the convention, the majority of applications came from just a small number of countries.

So, in 1994, a committee of member states called for a list that truly represented the world’s diverse wonders, and UNESCO has worked hard since then to fulfill this mission. Today, 178 countries boast heritage sites, including such places as Lebanon’s cedar forests, Cuba’s Viñales Valley, and the Uzbek city of Samarkand.

But a bigger list has brought bigger challenges, many of which surfaced in a series of conferences organized on the occasion of the World Heritage List’s 30th anniversary. The ideas that emerged from one such conference in Britain are now the subject of a special issue of the New Zealand journal Current Issues in Tourism. In it, many of the journal’s authors explore a fundamental question: Which values should the list protect? As David Harrison of London’s International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development writes in his introductory essay, "What matters are the meanings that people project onto these inanimate objects, these ‘things men have made.’" Perhaps, but that still leaves open the question of what should be valued more or less.

From the start, the convention’s drafters aimed to protect sites with "universal value," places that had been internationally recognized as having historic or artistic merit. Nevertheless, that standard has expanded with the growing acceptance of the culturally relative notion that places can be valued by different people for a variety of different reasons. For example, many countries rely heavily on tourists as a source of income, whereas numerous sites have important cultural or religious significance for local groups. It is not easy to say which values national governments are trying to protect when they nominate a site for consideration: They determine the degree of local participation in their own selection process, which often remains unknown to the outside world.

Nor is it the case that all local populations want to receive the recognition. Many fear that landing on the World Heritage List will lead to a loss of independence and restrictions on land use. British geographer Kevin Williams attributes the negative attitude in some quarters of the United States to a distrust of the U.N. system, fear of losing control of sites, and general ignorance about the convention. Three authors from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands explain that Dutch resistance to listing the Wadden Sea stems, in part, from their disillusionment with the level of protection the convention grants. Still, the attitude of local populations toward World Heritage Sites has received little study.

Considering the case of Vietnam, anthropologists Tomke Lask and Stefan Herold, of the University of Liège in Belgium, propose the creation of "observation stations" to monitor public participation in World Heritage decisions. It is a good idea, and one that should be considered for use in other countries, especially those places where civil society and legal protections remain weak. Otherwise, the World Heritage List may become little more than a string of tourist destinations — hardly a safeguard for our shared humanity.