50 Years World Heritage Convention: Shared Responsibility – Conflict & Reconciliation, by Marie-Theres Albert, Roland Bernecker, Claire Cave, Anca Claudia Prodan and Matthias Ripp. Springer Cham, 2022. 504pp. ISBN9783031056628

This open access volume brings together 38 chapters that reflect on different facets of the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (WHC). The WHC is one of the world’s most successful treaty regimes of all times in terms of its widespread ratification and recognizability, and certainly the most successful one under UNESCO’s umbrella. The volume’s publication, timed to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the treaty’s adoption, marks an apt moment for celebration, reflection, and mobilisation.

The volume particularly focuses on the idea of ongoing threats to world heritage and its regime, and the idea of destruction. As the editors put it in their concluding chapter to the volume, ‘Heritage creates identity and the destruction of heritage destroys identity.’ (p. 482). The stakes for the world on which the volume seeks to have an impact are high indeed.

The volume is the product of a series of workshops the editors held over the course of 2021, followed by an international conference. In addition to two introductory chapters (Part I) and six chapters dedicated to ‘the day after tomorrow’ for the WHC (Part III), the bulk of the book (Part II) is organised around six specific themes that foreground threats to the WHC: global governance; urban transformation; war and terrorism; climate change; technological change; and commodification.

Part I of the book contains two introductory texts. One is an overall introduction, authored by all editors, Marie-Theres Albert, Roland Bernecker, Claire Cave, Anca Claudia Prodan, and Matthias Ripp, which describes the purposes of the volume, its background, and summarises all the chapters. The second chapter, by Birgitta Ringbeck, outlines the importance of the WHC, and the need for its reimagining, particularly in terms of its representativeness, and its ability to incorporate voices still largely excluded from its processes. In particular, it argues that the WHC can become a tool to address the ‘losses and breaks caused by colonization’, which ‘still have an impact on the awareness of and the access to heritage, as well as on the possibility to build on conservation policies that have evolved over time, on political attention and, last but not least, on active participation in the implementation of the Convention.’ (p. 24).

This quote from Ringbeck’s chapter encapsulates, in many ways, what I see as the key tension that runs through the volume. Specifically, the contributors to the volume seem to be all animated by the possibility of reforming the WHC system to make it serve a new or changing world. This view, while wonderfully optimistic, is not without its limits.

To be fair, the WHC has proven to be a remarkably resilient and adaptable instrument over the past five decades, incorporating notions that were far from the political radar in the 1970s, such as a broader consideration of intangible values, or a more substantial integration of community engagement perspectives. But these attempts have always hit a relatively low (in my view) ceiling: intangible heritage values can seldom be used as the key criterion for Outstanding Universal Value; community participation happens in piecemeal ways, largely subject to the will of states and expert organisations in ‘gifting’ these communities a fragile seat at the proverbial table.

All in all, there is only so far the WHC can go, and attempts at working only within it optimistically miss the outer limits of what this treaty can accomplish. Well-meaning interventions end up bolstering the WHC and its limits, with effects on heritage practice more broadly (given the prominence of the WHC). It might be that the WHC needs more views from the outside so it can see its own limitations for what they are – hard limits –, instead of invitations for measured internal reform. At the very least, doing so might prompt deeper reform within the WHC, especially in relation to intangible heritage values, representativeness, colonial legacies, and community control over their heritage.

The first set of chapters in Part II of the volume – titled ‘The Destruction of Heritage is Multidimensional – Theoretical Reflections, Case Studies and Narratives’ is devoted to global governance. In it, authors argue that ‘we need to acquire a broader perception of the transformations in international relations’ (Roland Bernecker and Nicole Franceschini, p. 31), that ‘the World Heritage Convention culture and cultural heritage increasingly lost connection with the continuously rising agenda of sustainability and sustainable development’ (Id., p. 39), that the WHC does not account sufficiently for Indigenous worldviews and rights (Fogarty), that the WHC organs need to pay more attention to local capacity-building (Eike Tobias Schmedt), and, in a collective piece assembling short texts from many authors, that the WHC needs to pay more attention to decolonization, communities, and the connections between nature and culture. Taken together, the chapters in this section walk well-trodden paths restating the limits of the WHC. The authors are all lucid and knowledgeable, but replay debates without necessarily advancing them. This approach of reforming from the inside does not often help show a way forward, nor the needed radical alternatives to the mainstream discussion.

The second set of chapters focuses on urban transformation, largely discussing the 2011 Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). Some chapters leverage urban transformation to transform heritage itself, via the concept of intangible heritage as being constantly recreated (Christer Gustafsson and Matthias Ripp), even highlighting the temporary uses of urban buildings to perceive the changeability of heritage (Mariko Ikeda). The integration of intangible cultural heritage perspectives also appears in connection to leveraging festivals and even mega-events in urban environments to trigger heritage relationships (Zachary M Jones), the inclusion of community voices to advance sustainability (Dennis Rodwell), and even to use urban heritage as a way to create dialogues to redress colonial legacies (Jan Küver). Taken together, the key message of this set of chapters is to take intangible values more seriously, an approach enabled by the HUL Recommendation.

The third major challenge to the WHC the book identifies is war and terrorism. A few chapters focus on specific instances of destruction and their condemnation, outlining the relationship between the WHC and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict regime (Friedrich Schipper), on the specific destruction of the Palmyra world heritage site and its impact on local communities (Zeina Elcheikh), and the Islamic narratives of heritage preservation to counter anti-Islamic discourse that equates that belief system to heritage destruction (Azeez Olaniyan and Akeem O Bello). Other chapters highlight the possibilities of heritage to build peace discourses in post-conflict areas (Lorika Hisari, Kristen Barrett-Caseu, and Kalliopi Fouseki), or on the need for more criminal enforcement rules, arguing that the heritage protection ‘requires a robust, legally integrated approach, including criminal prosecution for plundering, smuggling, and destruction.’ (Sabine von Schorlemer, p. 201). These chapters thus operate in a mixed register of moral outrage and denunciation, with some redemptive narratives. In this sense, they echo the volume’s overall idea of showcasing a deficient system and attempting to fix it from the inside, except here the shortcomings are not the system’s own creation, but rather external threats, which further legitimate the system itself.

The reliance on external threats that simultaneously expose and excuse the WHC’s limitations also cuts through the fourth set of chapters in this part of the volume, which bring to the fore conversations about climate change. Chapters map the relationships between climate change and world heritage relying again on links to intangible heritage (Claire Cave), how the WHC needs to change to accommodate alterations of heritage induced by climate change (William P Megarry), attempts to ‘ensure the relevance of heritage in an uncertain future’ within the WHC confines (Cathy Daly, p. 239), thinking more about biodiversity conservation frameworks as examples for the WHC (Esteban Avigliano and Nahuel Schenone), historic gardens as examples of climate adaptation (Michael Rohde), and the impacts of climate change on Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal, where Mount Everest is located (Sushma Bhatta, Robin Boustead, and Kurt Luger).

The following part, on technological change, is the one that most clearly incorporates external perspectives to shape in a substantial way the future of the WHC. Here, authors outright ask whether technological change poses a risk or opportunity for the WHC (Alexander Siegmund and Anca Claudia Prodan), before connecting to ways in which technology can help save world heritage via water technology (Yonca Erkan), or how mining may not be that bad of a threat to heritage if done in certain ways (Friederike Hansell). The idea of transformation borrowed from intangible heritage values returns in thinking about landscapes (Michael Kloos), as well as the integration of community sentiment (Mario Hernández, Philippe De Maeyer, Luc Zwartjes, and Antonio Benavides Castillo). Digital technology appears to enhance tourism and its sustainability (George N Zaimes, Valasia Iakovoglou, Fergus T Maclaren and Pankaj Manchanda), in the ultimate redemptive narrative of the WHC’s resilience and adaptability to a world that did not exist when the treaty came into existence. The lesson in this section of the volume is clear: technology, despite being an external threat, ultimately keeps the WHC relevant.

The final set of chapters move away from a reflection around future challenges around heritage, returning to the core of heritage protection impulses. Focusing on whether heritage protection, and the WHC specifically, contributes to commodify heritage, and the positive and negative implications of it, these chapters ask these fundamental questions by introducing Marxist notions of commodification (Thomas M Schmitt), by describing cases where commodification can be avoided, such as religious sites, given their non-market value (Lia Bassa), using commodification as a lens through which to read the same extractive industries that technology could redeem in the previous set of chapters (Claudia Lozano), or leveraging community interest as a means to make sense of commodification in positive ways (Fabienne Wallenwein). This set of chapters, taken as a whole, is agnostic on commodification. It does seem, however, that the idea underpinning them all is, at the very least, a presumption against commodification that needs to be rebutted or skirted. They avoid mentioning that the WHC itself may contribute to commodify heritage by the very process of listing. They assume, in other words, that the WHC can pursue its heritage safeguarding objectives without considering the potentially dangerous economics of heritage that the visibility of the listing process generates.

Against this varied but ultimately WHC-redemptive background, the third part of the volume attempts to gaze at the instrument’s future. Here, chapters highlight the WHC’s potential to promote shared responsibility (Marie-Theres Albert), reconciliation (Birgitta Ringbeck), and sustainability (Constanze Fuhrmann). Contributors also advocate to promote more widely world heritage education (Claudia Grünberg and Klaus-Christian Zehbe) and youth participation (multiple authors). The chapters here underscore the volume’s overall tone of how the WHC can be saved from within, without reckoning sufficiently (in my view) with the hard ceilings of this type of reformist approach.

Because of this commitment to the WHC and its future, the volume’s many contributions come together as being still primarily invested in the conservation paradigm and the system. This position is ultimately understandable, even though authors could have been more explicit in envisioning radical pathways for change, while retaining optimism for the future of the WHC. But perhaps optimism is just what we need, and the dilution of critique is what we get as the result of dialogue bringing together 38 chapters with contributors from all inhabited continents (albeit with an expected prevalence of European – particularly German – contributors). My additional criticism of the volume is that there are no clear Pacific voices in the volume (and few African voices), which is a shame given the importance of the notions of representativeness, colonialism, and climate change, to name but a few of the key challenges to the WHC’s resilience today.

Overall, the volume is a terrific starting point to the debate around the future of the WHC, providing insights to reform the system from within. It can be a very useful reading for heritage scholars and managers seeking to explore the dizzying range of discourses that feed into conversations about the future of the premiere worldwide regime in heritage thinking and management.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

   Lucas Lixinski

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Correspondence to Lucas Lixinski.

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The author declares that he has no competing interests. Matthias Ripp, one of the authors of this book, is a member of Editorial Board of Built Heritage.

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Lixinski, L. 50 Years World Heritage Convention: Shared Responsibility – Conflict & Reconciliation, by Marie-Theres Albert, Roland Bernecker, Claire Cave, Anca Claudia Prodan and Matthias Ripp. Springer Cham, 2022. 504pp. ISBN9783031056628. Built Heritage 8, 32 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-024-00147-y

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• Received: 11 July 2024

• Accepted: 22 July 2024

• Published: 16 August 2024

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-024-00147-y

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