Introduction
Heritage has become an increasingly prominent concept in today's globalized world.Footnote 1 As the geographer David Lowenthal stated in his seminal book, ‘All at once heritage is everywhere – in the news, in the movies, in the marketplace – in everything from galaxies to genes.’Footnote 2 In spite, or possibly because, of its pervasiveness, cultural heritage is an elusive concept. As scholars in the booming interdisciplinary field of heritage studies stress, ‘heritage’ ‘is not a thing, an object, or a place’. Rather, it is a social construct, one in which a material artefact, a monument, a site, or a cultural practice is endowed with meaning.Footnote 3 This implies that heritage is not immutable; quite the opposite. The prime focus of heritage studies, however, has been on the present forms of heritage rather than on its history.Footnote 4
This article offers novel historical analysis of the globalization of heritage. Specifically, it analyses the most prominent instrument of today's global heritage governance,Footnote 5 the 1972 World Heritage Convention, as a lens through which to view the intellectual history of heritage – the history of shifting concepts – on a global scale.Footnote 6 The World Heritage Convention of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was the first international instrument to encompass both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage. It did so, however, by drawing a sharp divide between these two categories. Moreover, reflecting the dominant influence of the European traditions of archaeology, art history, and architectural conservation, the Convention recognized only archaeological sites, monuments, and historic town centres as cultural heritage. By the turn of the millennium, the range of World Heritage cultural categories had widened to include cultural landscapes, canals, and routes, as well as modern, rural, and industrial architecture. The concept of cultural landscapes, I contend, offers a potent means by which to analyse the process of (re)negotiation of the meaning of heritage on a global scale. Not only did it bridge the traditional nature–culture divide, but it also introduced the notion of intangible cultural heritage a decade before the adoption of a specific UNESCO instrument, the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention.
A central argument of this study is that the broadening of the definition of World Heritage to include cultural landscapes occurred through a process of competition and cooperation between the key actors involved in global heritage governance: governmental and non-governmental international organizations, transnational networks, and governments, as well as individuals. Global governance is a complex term – one that has given rise to different strands of political theory since the 1990s.Footnote 7 Borrowing Oran Young's characterization in his work on global governance as viewed from the environmental sector, I define it as ‘sets of rules, decision-making procedures, and programmatic activities that serve to define social practices and to guide the interactions of those participating in these practices’.Footnote 8
The second major claim of this study is that the changing definition of World Heritage marked a shift in the geography of power among experts involved in global heritage governance.Footnote 9 In the 1960s and 1970s, European (primarily continental) experts played the leading role in devising international conservation standards and heritage norms and concepts. The criteria designed in 1992 for World Heritage cultural landscapes, by contrast, largely reflected values and ideas developed outside continental Europe: an Anglo-North American agenda conceptualizing landscapes as a cultural heritage category alongside more traditional categories; and an agenda developed in the post-colonial context of post-settler states in Oceania – one designed to take account of indigenous perceptions of the past.
This article shares two central assumptions with the rich body of scholarship on nature and landscape: a vision of nature as a human construct and an understanding of landscape as closely related to power. While acknowledging nature's ‘otherness’, these studies by geographers, landscape architects, and environmental historians argue that ideas about nature and landscapes cannot exist outside a specific sociocultural setting.Footnote 10 The current article shows how the process of defining cultural landscapes globally brought into dialogue multiple and often conflicting visions of landscape, reflecting their specific sociocultural context. By shifting their focus from ‘sight’ to ‘site’,Footnote 11 from ‘scenery’ to ‘polity’,Footnote 12 landscape studies have, moreover, paid increasing attention to the influence of power and visions of social justice in shaping the physical landscape.Footnote 13 Some have also stressed how ‘those who claim to speak for … the landscape … simultaneously make a powerful claim to power’.Footnote 14 I demonstrate that the question of who is entitled to speak for cultural landscapes was contentious precisely because it entailed claims to power in global heritage governance.
What this article adds to the existing literature is a fine-grained historical analysis of the ways in which distinct groups of historical actors endeavour to promote their contrasting ideas of culture, nature, and landscape on a global scale. Rather than using the physical environment or environmental ideas as a basis for the analysis, it explores the views and strategies of specific actors – both institutions and individuals – and it retrieves their voices. In so doing, it highlights the ways in which these actors negotiated the meaning of landscape in the global framework of UNESCO, challenging competing views and ultimately forging compromises to advance at least part of their agenda. As such, the article yields insights into the process through which certain ideas acquire hegemonic status internationally.
This article also provides a counter-narrative to the literature on culture as a contested terrain during the Cold War. During the last two decades, international and global historians have shown how Cold War rivalries shaped not only the production of artistic and literary goods but also their diffusion, perception, and (re)appropriation.Footnote 15 The gist of these works is that cultural production and management during the Cold War cannot be understood independently from the battle between competing ideologies and rival foreign and military policies. Yet the field of immovable cultural heritage conservation – which was primarily archaeological and architectural heritage conservation during this period – remained largely impervious to Cold War dynamics. I suggest that the explanation for such imperviousness lies in the fact that this field was dominated by art historians and architectural conservation specialists giving pride of place to the preservation of an existing, time-honoured heritage and to the use of technical expertise to serve this objective.
One final comment on sources is in order. Lack of archival records constitutes a challenge for a historical study of the World Heritage Convention. The UNESCO archival materials on the topic are sparse. Official UNESCO documents are a useful starting point for factual information but they yield virtually no insights into decision-making processes. Access to the archives of the other international organizations involved in World Heritage is uneven. Finally, individual experts have rarely deposited their private papers with public institutions. I have thus supplemented whatever archival records are publicly available with interviews and private papers shared by some individuals. I have addressed the problem of subjective reconstructions of the past by cross-checking information through parallel interviews with several actors. At the same time, interviews are invaluable for telling stories (such as the one recounted in this article) that have only partially been recorded in written documents.
UNESCO, heritage, and the World Heritage Convention
Cultural heritage conservation was part of UNESCO's activities almost from the outset, even though education was the main rationale for its creation.Footnote 16 As early as 1948, the UNESCO General Conference recommended the creation, under UNESCO's auspices, of an international committee of experts in charge of ‘cooperat[ing] with the states concerned in the preservation of monuments and sites of historical value’.Footnote 17 This International Committee on Monuments, Artistic and Historical Sites and Archaeological Excavations was established in 1950. By 1956 it had spurred the UNESCO General Conference to adopt a (non-binding) Recommendation on International Principles Applicable to Archaeological Excavations.Footnote 18 Four years later UNESCO had launched its first major international campaign to safeguard cultural heritage, in Nubia: the excavation of thousands of objects and the relocation of temples – including the Temples of Ramses II at Abu Simbel and the Sanctuary of Isis at Philae – that would have been flooded as a result of the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Coordinating the funds offered by donor states and controlling the rescue work, UNESCO subsequently conducted a series of other international campaigns, including in Venice after the 1966 flood and for the Temple of Borobudur in Indonesia from 1972 to 1982. By 1972 the UNESCO Secretariat had also become the secretariat of the World Heritage Convention.
UNESCO's involvement in archaeology and architectural conservation reflected a long-standing European concern with what came to be known as ‘heritage’.Footnote 19 In 1903, the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl pointed to a ‘modern cult of monuments’.Footnote 20 This cult reached back to the eighteenth century and began to receive a legislative basis in European countries in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 21 The destruction of cultural heritage during World War Two and the perceived threat raised by economic modernization and urbanization in the post-war era triggered new efforts to strengthen national legislations, and created novel instruments such as the World Heritage Convention to provide ‘an effective system of collective protection of the cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value’.Footnote 22
Like other UNESCO conventions, the World Heritage Convention established a new international institution charged with its implementation: the World Heritage Committee, an intergovernmental committee composed of representatives from twenty-one states, elected by the treaty signatories. These delegates could be diplomats – typically permanent delegates, that is, ambassadors to UNESCO – and/or government officials, the latter generally drawn from the culture and environment sectors but not necessarily boasting expertise in heritage. The World Heritage Committee was entrusted with decision-making powers. At its first meeting in 1977, it adopted Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Convention.Footnote 23 These Operational Guidelines specified six criteria for the inclusion of cultural heritage sites and four for natural heritage sites on a ‘World Heritage List’. Unlike the text of the Convention, these guidelines were subject to revision. They have been revised on a number of occasions since 1977. The World Heritage List has been the prime area of decision-making of the World Heritage Committee: while only national governments may propose sites for inclusion, the World Heritage Committee chooses which nominations to accept.
The World Heritage Committee is not the only actor in the governing apparatus of the World Heritage Convention. There is also the UNESCO Secretariat. For the first two decades, staff members from two different UNESCO Secretariat divisions – the Science Sector and the Culture Sector – administered the Convention along with other duties. In 1992, the UNESCO director general established a unit specifically in charge of operating the World Heritage Convention: the World Heritage Centre. In addition, three international organizations were assigned an advisory role in the Convention's implementation: the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an international non-governmental organization; the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), an intergovernmental organization; and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an organization composed of both non-governmental organizations and governments. A central task of ICOMOS and IUCN has been the evaluation of sites proposed for inclusion on the World Heritage List since its creation in 1978.
The overall mandate of ICOMOS and IUCN was – and still is – much broader. IUCN was established in 1948 by the representatives of thirty-two countries and eleven international organizations as a body designed to promote nature conservation worldwide. Over time, IUCN expanded its mandate to include the conservation of natural resources, the preservation of ecosystems, and, more recently, broader environmental issues such as climate change.Footnote 24 ICOMOS was established in 1965 by a group of primarily European architectural conservation experts. Their goal was to stimulate transnational cooperation among built heritage conservation specialists.Footnote 25 They were also keen to spread the gospel of the 1964 Venice Charter, a new code of professional best practice, but one deeply rooted in the theory of architectural conservation developed in Europe since the late nineteenth century.
The 1972 World Heritage Convention resulted from the merging of two initiatives: a US government plan for ‘A Trust for the World Heritage’ intended to encourage ‘international cooperative efforts to identify, establish, develop and manage the world's superb natural and scenic areas and historic sites for the present and future benefit of the entire world citizenry’;Footnote 26 and a proposed instrument dealing with cultural heritage elaborated within UNESCO. The UNESCO plan was intended to create ‘a Red Cross for monuments, groups of buildings and sites of universal value’.Footnote 27 The US government chose to support the UNESCO text provided that it was revised to give equal importance to natural heritage. This decision was due in part to the American belief that ‘an intergovernmental organization within the UN framework would be helpful in forcing the commitments undertaken by the parties and securing the necessary financing’.Footnote 28 The text of the World Heritage Convention was finalized at UNESCO by a ‘special committee of governmental experts’ – including delegates from some sixty countries and both non-governmental and governmental organizations – before its adoption by the UNESCO General Conference in November 1972.Footnote 29
Reconsidering the World Heritage divide between culture and nature
During the 1980s, the World Heritage divide between culture and nature began to be challenged. Three sets of actors led the debate: the French government, nature conservation activists in the framework of IUCN, and the British government. Accordingly, the talks, albeit inconclusive, underlined three visions of nature and landscape. The French emphasized aesthetics, as encapsulated in Alain Roger's conceptualization of the landscape as the outcome of an ‘art-making’ process (artialisation, a word borrowed from the sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne).Footnote 30 IUCN advanced ecological considerations, in line with its nature conservation mandate. The British focused on the English tradition of the settled landscape, one acknowledging the far-reaching impact of human activity while giving pride of place to rural scenery, as summed up in W. G. Hoskins’ pioneering book on The making of the English landscape.Footnote 31
Discussions on re-conceptualizing the relationship between cultural and natural heritage began early on, but they would not come to a successful conclusion until 1992. The World Heritage Committee implicitly recognized the shortcomings of this divide as early as 1979 by including Guatemala's Tikal National Park on the World Heritage List under cultural (archaeological remains) and natural (bio-ecological features) criteria. Tikal National Park thus became the first World Heritage ‘mixed site’. However, this category still implied an ontological division between culture and nature.
It was a French initiative that spurred a genuine reassessment of the culture–nature divide. While being driven by nationalistic objectives, this move reflected a vision of landscape closely tied to the French context. Pleading for change in 1984, a French Ministry of the Environment official argued that the World Heritage Operational Guidelines needed amendments to encompass ‘exceptionally harmonious, beautiful, man-made landscapes’.Footnote 32 This formula encapsulated the pre-eminence of aesthetic values in French views on landscape. Although the French official was politically astute enough to mention both European (vineyards, the terraced fields of the Mediterranean basin) and non-European (the terraced rice fields of Southeast Asia) examples, his objective was presumably the same as the one articulated in a subsequent memorandum: namely, to secure the inclusion of some of France's ‘rural landscapes’ in the World Heritage List.Footnote 33
Subsequently, IUCN promoted its vision of landscape as a modified environment, yet one that deserved preservation for its natural, rather than its manmade, features. By the 1980s IUCN had not only expanded its mandate but also recognized ‘the vital importance of people in the people/nature equation’, to quote a prominent member of the organization.Footnote 34 This led to the identification of ‘landscapes’ as one of IUCN's Protected Area categories: Category V. Thus IUCN's goal was to enhance the standing of Category V through the inclusion of ‘those internationally important places which best show how man and nature, and conservation and development, can exist in harmony’ on the World Heritage List.Footnote 35 IUCN tabled the report that served as a basis for discussion at the meeting of experts convened by ICOMOS in Paris in 1985.Footnote 36 In line with this report, the experts couched their proposed guidelines for the inclusion of ‘rural landscapes’ on the World Heritage List in a language of nature conservation. Central ecological concepts – such as ‘harmonious balance’ and ‘evolution’ in particular – were prominent in the report.Footnote 37
It was probably due to ICOMOS's opposition that the proposed reform fell through. The ICOMOS president, a French art historian, had no qualms about IUCN's vision of landscape. His concerns lay elsewhere: he worried that the proposed new criteria for ‘rural landscapes’ might also be applied to cultural heritage and hence create havoc in the well-ordered world of international cultural heritage conservation. He warned that the use of ethnological and sociological criteria carried the risk of ‘one-upmanship [surenchère]’ through their potential extension to strictly cultural heritage sites.Footnote 38 We may guess that he voiced these objections at the 1985 meeting of the World Heritage Committee, thus contributing to its inconclusive outcome.Footnote 39
Pursuing a similar logic to its French counterpart, the British government subsequently took the lead. Since the World Heritage Committee recommended a case-by-case approach, the British government used this opportunity to try to include one of Britain's rural landscapes on the World Heritage List, setting forth as a test case a quintessentially English landscape: the Lake District. Since the eighteenth century the Lake District had been celebrated by painters and poets such as Thomas de Quincey and William Wordsworth. The site was also dotted with villas, gardens, and trees to enhance its picturesque qualities and ensure that it matched pictorial and literary expectations.Footnote 40 IUCN and ICOMOS evaluated the proposed nomination separately, and IUCN adopted a narrow focus on the site's natural features, judging that there were more outstanding examples of glaciation and wildlife.Footnote 41 The reframing of the nomination as a cultural – as opposed to a mixed cultural–natural – site, however, also ended in failure in 1990. One insider has pointed to the objections of delegates from the South: ‘the Third World … questioned the importance of Wordsworth in world terms’.Footnote 42 In short, what was being challenged was the universal value of the distinctly English vision of landscape associated with the Lake District and its artistic and literary tradition.
Towards a new global heritage category: a battle of influence and ideas
Shortly after the creation of the World Heritage Centre, its founding director, Bernd von Droste, stated that it was designed to be ‘at the crossroads’, coordinating the actions of non-governmental/partly non-governmental organizations (ICOMOS and IUCN) and intergovernmental institutions (the World Heritage Committee).Footnote 43 This statement, while highlighting the coordination role of the World Heritage Centre, glosses over the competition among the various actors involved in World Heritage. The genesis of the introduction of ‘cultural landscapes’ as a World Heritage category in 1992 highlights both that competition and the need for cooperation to usher in change. It also shows how the international definition of a concept such as ‘cultural landscape’ mobilized conflicting visions of nature, culture, and landscape shaped by specific sociocultural backgrounds.
The new World Heritage Centre placed the UNESCO Secretariat in a stronger position to participate actively in the cultural landscape reform, while personal initiative ensured that it made use of this opportunity. By bringing cultural heritage and nature conservation specialists into a single administrative entity, the Centre facilitated work on cultural landscapes, given that the category of cultural landscape spanned the traditional divide between culture and nature. One of von Droste's fresh recruits, the German geographer Mechtild Rössler, played a leading role in bringing the reform to a successful conclusion. Rössler was particularly suited to the task: German geographers were the first to coin the term ‘cultural landscape’ (Kulturlandschaft) in the late nineteenth century. To advance her goal, she forged an alliance with the French government. Specifically, she secured the financial and logistical support of the French Ministry of the Environment for a meeting of experts designed to ‘develop criteria for landscapes under the World Heritage Convention’.Footnote 44
In supporting the plan of the UNESCO Secretariat, French officials pursued both a new objective – strengthening French influence in World Heritage governance – and an old one – including France's landscapes on the World Heritage List. While pursuing these nationalistic goals, they were still advancing a landscape agenda that gave pre-eminence to beauty. On the eve of the creation of the World Heritage Centre, an official from the French Ministry of the Environment argued that this institutional change made room for enhanced French influence in World Heritage.Footnote 45 There were, he stated, new ‘opportunities for France to position itself on the scientific front [créneau] and on that of a possible evolution of the [World Heritage] Convention’. Simultaneously, French officials still wanted to include French landscapes such as the vineyards of Burgundy and Champagne, the land of the Cathars, and the Auvergne's volcanoes on the World Heritage List, all of which epitomized the French vision of landscape as an embodiment of beauty.Footnote 46 This French emphasis on landscape as heritage had gained new urgency by the 1990s because of growing concerns about the declining profitability of agriculture against the backdrop of the planned reform of the European Union Common Agricultural Policy (1992).Footnote 47 Such concerns prompted new efforts to search for alternative ways of increasing the value of the countryside, notably by turning it into heritage.Footnote 48
The UNESCO Secretariat and the French government, however, found themselves in competition with an international non-governmental organization, ICOMOS. Indeed, ICOMOS had devised plans of its own for an expert meeting in Canada on cultural landscapes. The ICOMOS secretary-general – the Canadian Herb Stovel – almost immediately challenged the French–UNESCO Secretariat plan. He viewed it as a French initiative rather than a joint plan with the UNESCO Secretariat and he penned a memorandum warning that if the French went their own way ‘ICOMOS and IUCN would consider … [their proposals] to have the importance of an expression of national interest’.Footnote 49
Stovel was guided by specific normative imperatives to reform international cultural heritage principles to make them less Eurocentric and even ‘truly global’.Footnote 50 His objective reflected his geographical background: he was Canadian whereas almost all of his predecessors had been European. Most importantly, he was the first North American to have dared to mount an active challenge to European supremacy within ICOMOS and, more broadly, in global heritage governance. He was suspicious of the French because he saw them – rightly so – as propounding a specific vision of landscape, one deeply rooted in the European tradition and at odds with the views developed in ‘the United States or Canada or countries formed by the “Anglo-Saxon culture of ecology” ’.Footnote 51 What he wanted was a meeting that was ‘truly global and truly representative of all the disciplines with an interest in the subject’,Footnote 52 that is, a meeting that would provide a platform for the advocates of a wider range of views on landscape, notably those developed in the Anglo-North American world.
Stovel was right to point to different landscape agendas in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world. Since the 1980s heritage specialists in Britain, Canada, and the United States had developed a new agenda for landscape as a cultural heritage category. By the following decade they had come to define ‘cultural landscapes’ as ‘the broad range of outdoor environments shaped by humans or associated with human cultural values’ – as opposed to aesthetically pleasing scenery.Footnote 53 Three main factors were influential in stimulating these new ideas. First, the rise of a broad-based environmental movement created greater awareness of the interconnections between humans and nature, notably in North America. Significantly, in 1980, Parks Canada – the federal division in charge of both cultural and natural heritage in Canada – was incorporated into the Department of the Environment.Footnote 54 Second, by bringing many children and future cultural heritage experts into contact with large tracts of relatively untouched nature, national parks in North America had encouraged them to look beyond architecture and designed gardens.Footnote 55 Third, in Europe itself, ‘there was (perhaps still is)’, as one British actor noted, ‘a difference in [landscape] traditions between northern Europe and the Latin countries, reflecting different approaches to knowledge and philosophy’: while the latter ‘tended to believe … in charters enshrining eternal truths’, the ‘more empirical’ Britons and Scandinavians were ‘sceptical’ of absolutes, ‘test[ing] ideas by their usefulness’ instead.Footnote 56 Two Frenchmen had indeed been the authors of the 1981 ICOMOS Charter on Historic Gardens setting absolute principles for the conservation of historic, designed gardens (a much narrower category than that of cultural landscapes). In contrast, a Briton (David Jacques), a Canadian (Susan Buggey), and an American (Nora Mitchell) created a semi-formal network (the ICOMOS Landscapes Working Group) in 1990 to promote a broader (and evolving) international agenda for cultural landscapes.Footnote 57
Stovel used the work of this network as proof of the legitimacy of ICOMOS's role in driving the UNESCO cultural landscape reform,Footnote 58 while also successfully forging an alliance with IUCN. His memorandum warning against French single-handedness was issued in both ICOMOS's and IUCN's names.Footnote 59 Faced with this challenge, the UNESCO Secretariat backed down: Rössler reckoned that the World Heritage Committee would resist a French ‘go-it-alone [Alleingang] with support from the World Heritage Centre’.Footnote 60 She convinced French officials to have a joint meeting, with the French hosting and ICOMOS selecting and inviting the participants.Footnote 61 Stovel accepted the compromise, praising Rössler, with perhaps a hint of irony, for exercising her ‘diplomatic skills to the utmost’.Footnote 62
Although ICOMOS and IUCN joined forces in the summer of 1992, they had previously been competing for leadership of the cultural landscape reform. Such competition was due both to a battle for influence and to diverging views on landscape reflecting different disciplinary backgrounds. In the late 1980s, some IUCN members argued that the organization would be ‘missing the boat’ in ‘handing over’ World Heritage landscapes to ICOMOS.Footnote 63 They worried that IUCN would lose influence not only in World Heritage but also in global environmental governance at a time when traditional nature conservation organizations such as IUCN had lost ground to broader organizations such as Greenpeace International. World Heritage was indeed seen by IUCN members as the organization's ‘highest profile activity’.Footnote 64 At the same time, ICOMOS and IUCN were guided by different normative imperatives. In line with their disciplinary basis, they disagreed on the primacy of cultural versus natural resources in landscape. IUCN's ‘Category V Landscapes’ placed primary emphasis on ‘the natural environment, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem integrity’, to quote a prominent member of IUCN at the time.Footnote 65 Cultural heritage specialists, by contrast, gave pre-eminence to the human and aesthetic dimensions. British experts, for instance, disliked central IUCN concepts such as ‘harmonious balance’ and ‘evolution’ because they made it seem ‘as if mankind has to follow ecological imperatives, whereas in all cultural matters mankind is the active ingredient’.Footnote 66 Even their North American counterparts had qualms about the notion of ‘outstanding harmonious balance’, despite their ecological sensitivity.Footnote 67 This term, they argued, ‘could preclude the consideration of landscapes which have been shaped through the considerable manipulation of the natural environment’.Footnote 68
The ICOMOS–IUCN alliance was possible because IUCN had agreed a few months earlier to transfer primary responsibility to ICOMOS for World Heritage cultural landscapes.Footnote 69 This shift was probably due to the persuasive lead of one of its influential members, the New Zealander Bing Lucas.Footnote 70 Lucas, the author of a book on protected landscapes,Footnote 71 believed in ‘the importance of “lived-in” landscapes for world conservation’.Footnote 72 He probably used this argument to persuade fellow IUCN members to back down: better to have such ‘“lived-in” landscapes’ recognized as cultural heritage under the World Heritage Convention than not at all.
The cooperation of previously competing actors was crucial in ensuring the successful outcome of the reform in 1992. There were still discordant voices at the meeting of experts held in France's Vosges National Park in October of that year. The French insisted on the importance of aesthetic values while the New Zealander and the Canadian countered that ‘beauty’ was not a defining characteristic of cultural landscapes, which also encompassed mining landscapes, for example.Footnote 73 Nonetheless, participants reached agreement on guidelines in less than three days.Footnote 74 The World Heritage Committee subsequently endorsed the experts’ recommendations with hardly any changes at its December 1992 meeting. UNESCO Secretariat staff members subsequently pointed to the influence of the June 1992 United Nations Rio Earth Summit and the new prominence of the concept of sustainable development that had ‘paved the way for a new thinking on human beings and their environment, linking culture and nature’.Footnote 75 While this claim may hold a kernel of truth, it is my contention that the cooperation of rival actors was a more influential factor, preventing clashes at the meeting and ensuring that the proposed criteria reflected a relatively broad spectrum of views.
This story thus casts into sharp focus the contrasting visions of nature, culture, and landscape that the international definition of a concept such as ‘cultural landscape’ mobilized. It shows that the conflicting views of individual actors and groups of actors were shaped by their specific backgrounds, both disciplinary and geographical/cultural. The divergences between ICOMOS and IUCN were primarily due to the different disciplinary backgrounds of their members. As natural scientists, IUCN representatives placed primary emphasis on ‘nature’, viewing ‘culture as a heritage of nature’.Footnote 76 In contrast, cultural heritage specialists within ICOMOS conceived of landscape as a human construct, trained as they were in the humanities and social sciences; consequently, they focused on ‘cultural’ landscapes. Reflecting the influence of cultural heritage experts in shaping the reform, the agreed criteria emphasized the human element in landscape, contrary to what Lowenthal has argued.Footnote 77 There were also differences among cultural heritage specialists themselves. The French and the Anglo-North American views on cultural landscapes reflected different cultural traditions rooted in specific geographical contexts. So did the vision of landscape developed in the post-colonial context of Oceania that would also be brought into the reform.
A post-colonial agenda turned global: indigenous cultural landscapes
The new cultural landscape criteria were explicitly designed to create an opening for non- or under-represented, notably indigenous, cultures. This outcome resulted from the internationalization of an agenda developed in the post-colonial context of Australia: namely, the recognition of the values of indigenous people in archaeological research in response to their growing political activism.Footnote 78 Although Australian experts ensured such internationalization, the initial impulse did not come from Australia but from Paris.
It was a prominent Australian archaeologist, Isabel McBryde, who, at the 1992 Vosges meeting of experts on World Heritage cultural landscapes, primarily defined the subcategory of cultural landscapes that created an opening for indigenous people as ‘associative cultural landscapes’.Footnote 79 The Anglo-North American understanding of the term ‘associative landscape’ stressed the connection between a given landscape and a historical event (notably battles, with the US predilection for battlefields)Footnote 80 or particular artists (such as painters or writers).Footnote 81 Through her contribution to the Vosges meeting, McBryde ‘broadened the approach to associative values’.Footnote 82 The definition endorsed at this meeting marked a paradigm shift in the World Heritage Convention by introducing the notion of intangible cultural heritage. The inclusion of associative cultural landscapes in the World Heritage List was indeed deemed ‘justifiable by virtue of the powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element rather than material cultural evidence, which may be insignificant or even absent’.Footnote 83 This notion of intangible cultural and religious connections was designed to take account of indigenous people's holistic perceptions of the land.
McBryde's concerns about indigenous people reflected the transformation of archaeology in the post-colonial context of Australia and her active role in this process. As in other post-settler states in Oceania and the Americas in the 1970s and the 1980s, growing indigenous political activism prompted the rise of what would be termed ‘indigenous archaeology’, namely ‘an expression of archaeological theory and practice in which the discipline intersects with Indigenous values, knowledge, practices, ethics, and sensibilities’ and involves ‘collaborative and community-orientated or -directed projects, and related cultural perspectives’.Footnote 84 Indeed, indigenous people demanded control not only over political and economic resources but also over the material record of their past and its interpretation. The Tasmanian activist Ros Langford forcefully made this point, creating a stir at the 1982 meeting of the Australian Archaeological Association: ‘We say that it is our past, our culture and heritage, and forms part of our present life. As such it is ours to control and it is ours to share on our own terms.’Footnote 85 Central issues in the debate included the repatriation of human remains from museums at home and abroad, custodianship of archaeological sites, and the collusion of archaeology with the colonial project of domination.Footnote 86 Archaeologists responded to this challenge – some willingly, others reluctantly – by moving towards consultation of, and collaboration with, indigenous community members and by involving them in research.Footnote 87 McBryde played a central role in developing indigenous archaeology in Australia. From 1970 to 1980, she was a member of the New South Wales Aboriginal Relics Advisory Committee,Footnote 88 the first such committee in Australia to consult Aborigines about archaeological work.Footnote 89 In 1985, she organized the annual symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities on the much debated topic of ‘who owns the past’.Footnote 90
Through her work with Aborigines, McBryde learned about their sense of place and their perceptions of what they term the ‘country’. To Aborigines, ‘country’ does not refer merely to the land but to a living entity composed of people, animals, plants, and rocks – one created and shaped by the ‘Dreaming’, a term designating the moves of ancestor sprits through the land in the Aboriginal cosmogony.Footnote 91 In her 1990s publications, McBryde stressed the ‘predominant spiritual qualities’ of the landscape in Aboriginal Australia, ‘its places linking the present with the world of ancestral creative beings in ways that powerfully affirm and sustain collective identity’.Footnote 92 Discussing the case of the Lake Eyre/Cooper Basin in Southern Australia, she portrayed it as a cultural landscape because Aborigines had developed a long-distance exchange system, which ‘together with the transactions and their cultural meanings, provide an overarching coherence’.Footnote 93 Such meanings were primarily expressed through intangible elements: ‘invisible, but well known and clearly defined corridors’ and the stories telling the creation of the landscape by ancestral heroes.Footnote 94 To McBryde, the recognition of such systems as cultural heritage at local, state, and/or national levels was crucial to avoid misrepresenting Aboriginal heritage based on ‘predominantly monumental’ principles, ‘conforming to our European traditions of ‘heritage’, rather than the values and practices of the creating culture’.Footnote 95 This argument had a political bent. Such recognition, McBryde further argued, meant paying ‘due recognition and respect’ to Aboriginal societies and hence promoting ‘national Reconciliation’.Footnote 96 Through such texts, McBryde was anticipating the plea of later Australian landscape scholars – primarily landscape architects – for ‘a more negotiated understanding of the important cultural implications’ of the spatial configuration of the landscape in the Aboriginal people's ‘country’.Footnote 97
At the 1992 Vosges meeting, McBryde was met with incredulity. She elaborated on the topic of places including features with cultural associations and on the intense spiritual relationship of Aborigines with the land.Footnote 98 She was probably keen both to improve the representativeness of the World Heritage List and to ensure, through ‘international recognition’ of such Aboriginal cultural traditions, that their ‘national values … [could not] be denied’.Footnote 99 Most meeting participants had not contemplated cultural landscapes without tangible features prior to that point.Footnote 100 In one British participant's words, ‘the idea that a cultural landscape could have no physical elements took us by surprise’.Footnote 101 ‘Fortunately’, he added, ‘I had read about “song-lines” so could just about get to grips with the concept’ (the term ‘song-line’ referring to the ‘Dreaming stories’ expressed through song, dance, painting, and storytelling). The Canadian participant had similar recollections: she remarked that the Europeans were ‘astounded’ that cultural landscapes could be without visual elements.Footnote 102 And Europeans were in a majority at the meeting: thirteen out of nineteen participants.Footnote 103
The UNESCO Secretariat was probably the main actor behind this initiative to include indigenous values in the cultural landscape reform. The French government and ICOMOS had not contemplated such inclusion, nor had the Australians pleaded for it internationally. In the words of one participant at the 1992 meeting of experts, Rössler ‘seems to have picked up the idea (partly for political reasons, one suspects)’.Footnote 104 This assumption is plausible. Rössler subsequently became the contact person or ‘focal point’ for indigenous issues in the UNESCO Secretariat's World Heritage Centre.Footnote 105 In this capacity, she persistently advocated World Heritage recognition of indigenous cultural landscapes. Most importantly, the question of indigenous people's rights was becoming increasingly prominent at the United Nations, including UNESCO.Footnote 106 In 1993 the UN General Assembly would even proclaim the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People (1995–2004). At UNESCO, the five-hundredth anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas in 1992 created a need for a programme specifically dedicated to indigenous people. The 1988 decision of the UNESCO Executive Board – tabled by Latin American countries with support from Spain and Portugal – merely provided for UNESCO's ‘association with the commemoration’ of ‘the encounter between two worlds’.Footnote 107 As it was subsequently designed, however, the programme included an ‘Amerindia 92’ component aimed at providing a counterpoint to the triumphalist narratives staged by the governments of former colonial and settler states, which were heavily criticized by indigenous community members.Footnote 108
The question of why in this context the UNESCO Secretariat selected an expert from Australia, as opposed to post-colonial states in the Americas, is an intriguing one. The answer points to the role of personal transnational connections. Australians were actively involved in the early implementation of the World Heritage Convention. In 1992, however, personal ties between the World Heritage Centre and Australian heritage experts were lacking.Footnote 109 Although McBryde was by then a highly respected archaeologist in Australia, she had not been involved in any international discussions.Footnote 110 A doctoral candidate at the Australian National University, Sarah Titchen, created new links through her doctoral work on the World Heritage Convention. She suggested the name of McBryde, her doctoral supervisor, as a potential participant at the Vosges meeting of experts.Footnote 111
Having secured the inclusion of an indigenous perspective in the cultural landscape reform, the UNESCO Secretariat was keen to have indigenous sites included in the World Heritage List. It could not – nor can it today – nominate sites for inclusion on the List, but it could encourage governments to nominate particular sites. Although further research in New Zealand archives is required, this is probably what happened for the nomination of New Zealand's Tongariro National Park.Footnote 112 Although the New Zealand government had first proposed Tongariro as a mixed site in 1986,Footnote 113 it was added to the List in 1990 as a natural site only. At its December 1992 meeting, the World Heritage Committee instructed the UNESCO Secretariat's World Heritage Centre to ‘contact the New Zealand authorities and request further supportive material on cultural aspects of this site in order to study the possibility to inscribe the site under cultural heritage criteria as well’.Footnote 114 It is likely that the World Heritage Centre was behind this initiative: observation by anthropologists and geographers has shown that the Centre has significant ability to influence the decisions of the World Heritage Committee.Footnote 115 In Tongariro's case, moreover, the World Heritage Centre invited Tumu Te Heuheu, paramount chief of one of New Zealand's Maori tribes, to present the case to the meeting that it organized in Germany in 1993 to reflect on the new World Heritage criteria for cultural landscapes. Sarah Titchen subsequently conducted an on-site evaluation of Tongariro on behalf of ICOMOS. Given her involvement in the reform – including participation in the Vosges meeting of experts – she naturally recommended the site for inclusion on the World Heritage List.Footnote 116 So it was that in 1993 Tongariro National Park became the first World Heritage cultural landscape – an associative landscape deriving its cultural significance from intangible elements: the religious value attached to the park's mountains by the Maoris.
Conclusion
As heritage scholars argue, cultural heritage is a process of regulation and negotiation of meanings.Footnote 117 The introduction of cultural landscapes as a World Heritage category occurred through a process of competition and cooperation between key actors involved in global heritage governance: UNESCO, non-governmental/partly non-governmental organizations, national governments, and individuals. This story shows that, although the World Heritage Convention is based on intergovernmental decision-making, actors other than national governments had the opportunity to shape its evolution. More broadly, it points to the influence of experts in global heritage governance, be they employed in academia, non-governmental organizations, governments, or the secretariat of an intergovernmental organization such as UNESCO.
The genesis of the World Heritage cultural landscape reform also witnessed a battle of ideas – one that marked the new sway in global heritage of ideas developed in Europe's former settler colonies, as opposed to Europe itself. The environmental historian William Cronon has argued that ‘given the universalizing tendencies that lie at the very core of this human construct called nature’ disagreements are inevitable.Footnote 118 The recognition of cultural landscapes as a World Heritage category conjured up competing ideas not only about nature but also about culture. As such, it naturally provided much ground for disagreements. Its outcome demonstrated the new influence of experts from post-settler states in North America and Oceania in global heritage governance. These experts inspired its path-breaking features, notably the rejection of beauty as a defining criterion and the incorporation of intangible cultural values.
This reform did not, however, entail a shift of influence away from the North and towards the South. This finding is intriguing. Since the 1960s UNESCO member states from the South had driven a redefinition of UNESCO programmes such as the Universal History of Humanity away from their Eurocentric universalist underpinnings and towards a multicultural approach. They also spurred UNESCO to launch new programmes based on a communitarian rather than a universalist approach – notably, the General History of Africa in 1965 and the Ten-Year Plan for the Study of African Oral Traditions in 1972.Footnote 119 No states from the South, however, appear to have advanced the need to include landscapes in the World Heritage List.Footnote 120 On the level of individual experts, an Oxford-educated archaeologist from a prominent Sri Lankan family was the only non-Northern member of the ICOMOS Landscapes Working Group, despite the Working Group's efforts to reach out to the five continents.Footnote 121 He was also the only representative from the South at the Vosges meeting in 1992.
While further research is required, I surmise that this assessment also holds for the 1994 Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List: Westerners sat in the driver's seat.Footnote 122 Such lack of active involvement of the non-settler post-colonial world in World Heritage until the very recent past can be ascribed to two main factors: the lasting influence of European experts in fields – archaeology and architectural conservation – that they had largely shaped; and unequal access to World Heritage governance.Footnote 123 First, Europeans dominated international heritage conservation until about 1990. Only then did they cease to hold the top positions within organizations such as ICOMOS. Many leading Asian and African cultural heritage specialists were trained in European universities or at the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property in Rome, which was closely connected to the Rome-based Italian Institute for Restoration. As the director of Sri Lanka's Heritage Conservation from 1983 to 2000 succinctly put it: ‘we were all the product of Western education’.Footnote 124 Second, unequal access to World Heritage governance acted against greater participation of the non-settler post-colonial world. From the late 1980s onwards, some World Heritage treaty signatories, notably the representatives of African governments, regularly deplored the uneven geographical distribution of the twenty-one-member World Heritage Committee (which was periodically elected by all treaty signatories at the General Assembly of States Parties).Footnote 125 The UNESCO Secretariat was even instructed to produce recommendations on the matter. The World Heritage Committee, however, ruled against the principle of regional quotas,Footnote 126 partly because its existing members were reluctant to reduce their own influence in World Heritage. Even when non-Western states were elected to the World Heritage Committee, they were not all able to send a sizeable delegation to meetings.Footnote 127 Whether they could send four or five delegates (France and the United States in 1990), one (Colombia, Mexico, and Peru that same year), or zero (Oman) obviously made an important difference.Footnote 128 The profile of the delegates sent to meetings also mattered: a junior foreign ministry official such as the head of the Peruvian Consulate-General in Vancouver could obviously contribute significantly less than the US head of the Preservation Assistance Division in the Department of the Interior at the 1990 meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Canada.Footnote 129 By failing to send cultural heritage and nature conservation specialists to meetings, the governments of non-Western World Heritage Committee members deprived their experts of networking opportunities on a global scale. Consequently, such experts were much less likely to be invited to expert meetings, which is where, according to a long-time insider, ‘much that was important for advancing heritage theory and concepts happened’.Footnote 130
Aurélie Elisa Gfeller is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione research fellow and a guest lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her first book, Building a European identity: France, the United States, and the oil shock, was published by Berghahn Books in 2012. She is currently conducting a research project on the history of transnational heritage cooperation with a focus on the UNESCO World Heritage Convention.
