The Future of World Heritage and the Emergence of Transnational Heritage Regimes

Abstract

The World Heritage Convention of UNESCO, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2012, was intended to promote the preservation and enjoyment of the world's most important natural and cultural heritage. It is now fast losing credibility because of political maneuvering and the inscription of sites that do not meet requirements for reasons of prestige and tourism development. This also threatens its role as an instrument to improve heritage management. That role is increasingly taken up by international corporations and banks, and globally we may well be seeing a shift from state-based frameworks that all go back to a “European” way of dealing with heritage, a regime, to a global and transnational heritage regime. At the same time, existing infrastructure and legislation in Western countries are under scrutiny as a result of financial crisis and economic recession, and, for developing countries, the wisdom of importing Western procedures and ethics is rightly being questioned.