Excerpt: 'Change Over Time' on UNESCO World Heritage at 50

Change Over Time is a semiannual, peer-reviewed journal of the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built environment. Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, the journal is edited by Gonick Family Professor Frank Matero and Lecturer Kecia Fong, both of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation.

The latest issue, 11.2 UNESCO World Heritage at 50, looks at the history of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 1972 World Heritage Convention, which was adopted in 1972 with the intention of protecting world cultural and natural heritage, linking the concepts of conservation and preservation of cultural properties.

“Saving the World: Fifty Years of the Convention, Conservation, and Collaboration” is by Lynn Meskell, the Richard D. Green University Professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, and Claudia Liuzza, the Rethinking Diplomacy Fellow at the Duke Center for International & Global Studies, who is an affiliated scholar with the University of Pennsylvania Cultural Heritage Center. In this excerpt, the authors chart the history of the Convention, from its triumphant rescue of Nubian sites threatened with submersion to the present-day challenge of incorporating what the authors call “the living aspects of heritage.”

Crafting the Convention

On November 16, 1945, forty-four nations gathered in London to forge an international body for educational and cultural cooperation under the aegis of the United Nations. Their project was no less than the intellectual and moral reconstruction of a world in ruins.(1) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), spent its first decades entreating the world to unite in conserving endangered marvels as a common patrimony. The managerial priorities of world­making took precedence, requiring a sophisticated bureaucracy that valorized scientific techniques as the primary means to ensure human progress and protect virtuous human endeavors.

UNESCO’s major contribution is generally considered to be its pioneering of international legal instruments such as the 1972 World Heritage Convention. Its legal framing, resting upon an assembly of States Parties, was premised on the goodwill and civility of states, both to each other and to their citizens. High-profile international salvage missions simultaneously made material the idea of cooperation between nations and showcased UNESCO putting all its ideals into action.

For UNESCO and the world of conservation, the Rescue of the Nubian Monuments and Sites (1959–1980) represents an achievement of global proportions. The ambitious plan was to save and study the sites and temples in Egypt and Sudan scheduled for submersion with the completion of the Aswan Dam. The success of the rescue also marked a turning point when great swaths of the world were presented with ideas that aspired to universal acceptance: a common humanity premised on a shared global past, shared responsibility for heritage protection worldwide, and the dissemination of Western technical expertise. In retrospect, the rescue mission elevated a nascent world heritage, just as it did the various pharaonic temples. This model of conservation was premised upon a system of presumed universals that would require novel legal and bureaucratic structures for the management of cultural heritage worldwide. Though not specifically stated, we might also see the initial stirrings of a language of rights to heritage and rights to culture in that campaign. UNESCO galvanized and institutionalized those sentiments and practices and literally set them in stone.(2)

Undoubtedly UNESCO’s most successful and highest­profile project of all time, the Nubia Campaign set an impossible model to follow, in terms of international cooperation, financing for preservation, and even global public relations and marketing. What crystallized in UNESCO’s mid­century mission to Egypt and Sudan was a material attempt to overcome simmering postwar conflicts by uniting countries with different religions, ideologies, languages, and politics in a common conservation goal. Portrayed as a vast international cooperation effort with unrivaled grandeur and romance, for UNESCO saving the Nubian temples might demonstrate once and for all that culture could contribute to a perpetual peace and at the same time, recapture the materialities of ancient civilization for the West.(3) A common humanity in the past would be paired with a common responsibility for the future.

Managing the Remarkable

The acclaimed success of the Nubian Campaign inspired many new monumental requests for UNESCO assistance in the field of cultural heritage. Wonders of the ancient world such as the Athenian Acropolis, the vast temple compounds of Borobudur in Indonesia, the capital of the Sukhothai Kingdom in northern Thailand, and the great Phoenician city of Tyre on Lebanon’s southern coast all required saving. In the raft of safeguarding missions between the 1960s and 1980s, UNESCO launched various appeals to secure both financial aid and technical expertise to conserve these remarkable sites.

After successes and setbacks, UNESCO emerged from these early salvage missions with a more technocratic focus to embark on a global program of saving the world’s greatest sites. It embraced its technical, advisory, and reporting priorities and moved further away from supporting multidisciplinary, research­oriented programs such as those of archaeology. An elaborate bureaucracy evolved to shore up this institutionalization, providing detailed reporting on and oversight of international collaborations, financial contributions, expert evaluations, mission reports, and an ever­expanding consultancy culture. These international campaigns were primarily technical and managerial, with fewer resources and less time and money to coordinate the work of engineers, conservators, and experts or to hire consultants, set up field offices, and staff them. UNESCO was providing technical solutions, retreating further into its bureaucratic, managerial, and expert­driven functions.

The great legacy of Nubia, and to some extent the International Safeguarding Campaigns to save Moenjodaro, Borobudur, and Venice, was the institutionalization of a global program to conserve the world’s greatest sites. On November 16, 1972, the members of UNESCO’s General Conference adopted an international treaty enshrining a system of collective protection, based on modern scientific methods, for the protection of cultural and natural heritage deemed as having ‘Outstanding Universal Value.’ Combining the conservation of nature and culture in one treaty is often considered its most innovative achievement. At the time of its formulation, the Convention’s main concern was the increasing threat to heritage sites worldwide. New and proliferating forms of danger, destruction, and deterioration signaled not only a loss for respective nations where the sites were located but also an impoverishment of the heritage of all nations.

The formulation of UNESCO’s 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage created the ultimate inventory and furthered the agency’s technocratic goals of listing, standardizing, monitoring, and conserving the past. The routine of managing the remarkable, the register of the world’s outstanding sites, required a vast bureaucratic machine: formation of an international legal instrument, a Secretariat for managerial matters, Advisory Bodies composed of technical experts, internal and external committees, auditors, independent evaluators, experts and consultants, States Parties and their national bureaucracies, and so on. By the late 1970s, UNESCO was already shifting from an agency able to mobilize a world of salvage projects such as Nubia, Venice, Moenjodaro, and Borobudur to a standard­setting agency and the world’s clearing house for culture. UNESCO generated handbooks, manuals, guidelines, and other documents in multiple languages to accompany its burgeoning programs. What remained central was the mid­century commitment to global conservation of the world’s treasures, embraced as a collective responsibility and afforded through technical solutions.

Conservation in Danger

Some claim that the 1972 Convention was largely a US invention focusing on natural sites, spearheaded by Russell Train and the US environmental lobby and later endorsed by President Richard Nixon. UNESCO’s own institutional histories credit René Maheu and regard the Convention as the culmination of international projects to save heritage in danger, like those for Nubia and Venice. Creators of the 1972 World Heritage Convention hoped to instill in all nations a set of obligations to conserve particular places for future generations. They sought to select the unique and irreplaceable wonders of the world and to categorize, inventory, and monitor their management according to uniform technical and managerial standards. In doing so, they transformed the miraculous into the mundane. Although the Convention was adopted in 1972 and entered into force in 1975, implementation began only in 1977, when more than forty States Parties had ratified it. Before that time the World Heritage List as we know it today was but an idea.

The Convention was primarily conceived as a conservation treaty, where each country pledged to conserve not only World Heritage sites within its territory but all national heritage. The earliest documents proposing an “international instrument for the protection of monuments and sites of universal value” was akin to a “Red Cross for monuments.”(4) The List, concerned with monuments in peril, would function as an advocacy tool to safeguard and conserve those properties. The main aim was then to attract public attention and funding, an aspect that was later transposed to the List of World Heritage in Danger. In 1978 the first dozen sites were inscribed by the World Heritage Committee, consisting of both natural and cultural sites from various regions of the globe. Famous places such as the Galapagos Islands, Yellowstone National Park, and the Old Town of Quito were some of the first enshrined, with scarcely any supporting documentation. When the Giza Pyramids were inscribed in 1979, it was claimed that “the exceptional historic, artistic and sociological interest of these monuments . . . needs no commentary.”(5) Yet even with the first few inscriptions, prescient concerns were raised that the workload and evaluation processes might outstrip the capacity of the Advisory Bodies and Secretariat.

While the international penchant for inscribing properties on the prestigious World Heritage List has continued unabated, the commitment to conservation, and conserving those sites already listed, has increasingly become the lesser priority. Another growing concern has been the burgeoning global tourism industry that UNESCO had previously promoted as a means of linking culture and development. Now tourism has taken its toll on World Heritage sites such as Venice, Petra, and Machu Picchu. With a profoundly changed context in the decades following 1972, World Heritage also expanded beyond the realm of conservation and has been called upon to shore up cultural identities, drive development, foster cooperation, promote rights, and generate tourism.

The 2000s were marked by escalating global conflict in which heritage sites were more ideologically and politically entwined, paralleled by further internal dissent among the States Parties about the direction of the Convention. The year 2001 marked UNESCO’s great failure to save the Bamiyan Buddhas from intentional destruction, although the statues were not inscribed on the World Heritage List. They were destroyed despite the fact that UNESCO had a long history of involvement in Afghanistan and Bamiyan itself, supporting museums and conservation training. Other failures include the Global Strategy to ensure a balanced and equitable World Heritage List: more than half the properties listed are in Europe, with few in the Pacific, the Caribbean, or parts of Africa. This brings the larger issue of credibility to the fore. And with the entrenchment of the nation­state at UNESCO, as at other UN agencies, has come the dominance of political decision making and politicians themselves. UNESCO has moved from being an organization of “great statesmen” to being one of states. Moreover, academics, activists, local communities, and Indigenous peoples regularly express dissatisfaction with UNESCO’s philosophies, procedures, regulations, impacts, and exclusions. It is not only issues of nationalism and sovereignty that rankle but the inability of today’s World Heritage regime to incorporate the living aspects of heritage that necessitate rights of inclusion, access, use, and benefits. For conservation to fulfill its mid­century promise for the future, it must strive to include the people who matter most, whose heritage it is, and to consider those who have the most to win or lose in the fate of World Heritage sites.

1) L. M. Meskell, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

2) Ibid. See also L. Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth  Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Allais, “The Design of the Nubian Desert: Monuments, Mobility, and the Space of Global Culture,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Aggregate (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); P. Betts, “The Warden of World Heritage: UNESCO and the Rescue of the Nubian Monuments,” Past & Present 226, no. S10 (2015), pp.100–125.

3) Meskell, A Future in Ruins.

4) P. Stott, “The World Heritage Convention and the National Park Service, 1962–1972,” George Wright Forum 28 (2011), UNESCO 1970 Desirability of adopting an international instrument for the protection of monuments and sites of universal value http://whc.unesco.org/archive/1970/16c­19e.pdf.

5) UNESCO Advisory Body Evaluation (ICOMOS), “Memphis and Its Necropolis: The Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur,” 1979, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/86/documents.