World Heritage and Sustainable Development: Purpose, Practice and Possibilities

At the 2015 Bonn Meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage (WH) Committee (40 COM 5C), a new policy was adopted to recognise that a ‘sustainable development perspective’ should be integrated into the processes of the WH Convention. This followed the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations. This still emergent policy opens new challenges and possibilities for WH Sites and marks a major philosophical shift from seeing WH as an end in itself, rooted in notions of Eurocentric intrinsic value, towards a more pragmatic view of WH designation as a means to an end. WH status allows local communities the opportunity to transform symbolic value into direct and indirect economic value and thus contribute towards several of the SDGs. This is usually through some forms of tourism activity, but there are many other ways by which WH Sites could be valorised to effect change and economic and social well-being.

Drawing upon work in China, this chapter examines how this ‘new’ meta-level discourse of UNESCO WH policy struggles to filter down to member states and site level. We explore the gaps in dialogue between WH Sites, communities and the wider frameworks of governance. Within formalised frameworks of site management there are gaps between policy and praxis but, at the same time, outside of such frameworks, there exist examples of creative approaches to addressing the SDGs that raise questions about the meaning and the utility of the WH category within a developing and developed world context.