WHY UNESCO?

As part of the UN family, UNESCO or more correctly the World Heritage Convention, is the only mechanism for global governance in the heritage sphere. Founded on international diplomacy and the aspirational goals to build peace and intercultural understanding, the organization is attempting to move beyond statist agendas, demonstrated controversially by the recent recognition of Palestinian sovereignty.Footnote ⁸ Established after the end of World War II in the wake of devastation and atrocity, UNESCO's task was to promote peace and “change the minds of men”Footnote ⁹ primarily through education and promotion of cultural diversity and understanding. While the specific issue of indigenous heritage has come to the fore only in recent decades, there was always a foundational commitment to ethnic communities, minorities, refugees, and other disenfranchised groups as a result of conflict, persecution, and intolerance. The didactic mission of UNESCO stemmed from a specifically European organization called the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) which operated between 1936 and 1946,Footnote ¹⁰ rather than being a direct offshoot from the United Nations. Founded by prominent figures such as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Mann, the ICIC was established to create a “state of mind conducive to the peaceful settlement of international problems within the framework of the League of Nations.”Footnote ¹¹ Not surprisingly, the work was focused on education, universities and libraries, and internationalism. Given this history of recognition and reconciliation, the long-standing ethos of cultural diversity, and protection of minority lifeways, it is not surprising that UNESCO has emerged as the only structural avenue to global governance and promotion of cultural heritage.

Within the UN family, UNESCO may not be as powerful as the high-profile international peacekeeping, environmental, or development programs; instead it is perceived as the cultural arm, the visionary agency, and the “ideas factory” for the larger organization.Footnote ¹² Secretariat members, who I interviewed at the Paris headquarters, expressed their pride at the scope and public impact of initiatives UNESCO has launched over the decades. Their mandate for world making includes advancing tolerance, diversity, and rights, all of which have a direct bearing on the promotion of indigenous heritage globally.

The World Heritage Centre (WHC) was established in 1992 to act as the focal point and coordinator within UNESCO for all matters related to world heritage. WHC ensures the day-to-day management of the 1972 World Heritage Convention. It organizes the annual sessions of the World Heritage Committee (“the Committee”) and its bureau, and provides advice to States Parties in the preparation of site nominations. WHC along with the advisory bodies also organizes international assistance from the World Heritage Fund and coordinates both the reporting on the condition of sites and the emergency action undertaken when a site is threatened. Advisory bodies such as the International Centre for the Study of Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) organize technical seminars and workshops, update the World Heritage List and database, and develop teaching materials devoted to heritage preservation.Footnote ¹³ Archaeologists often assume incorrectly that it is WHC that constitutes the major arm of decision-making regarding world heritage. However, that responsibility, in fact, falls to the Committee, in accordance with Article 8 of the Convention. This fact is particularly salient if we are envisioning instigating structural changes in the understanding and management of heritage, such as recognition of participation by nonstate actors like nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)Footnote ¹⁴ or upholding the heritage rights of minorities within nation-states. Currently, only States Parties serving on the Committee have voting rights: not NGOs or indigenous groups, not advisory bodies like the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) or the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), not even the WHC itself.

The Committee is made up of 21 States Parties, elected at a General Assembly, that serve a four-year term. Members must all be signatory nations to the World Heritage Convention and their representatives are state-appointed ambassadors, politicians, and professionals from both cultural and natural heritage. The Committee is the actual body responsible for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention. It defines the criteria for inscription, use of the World Heritage Fund, and allocates financial assistance upon requests from States Parties. Significantly, it has the final say on whether a property is inscribed on the World Heritage List.Footnote ¹⁵ The Committee can also defer its decision and request further information on properties from the nations in question. It examines reports on the state of conservation of inscribed properties and asks States Parties to take action when properties are not being properly managed. It also decides on the inclusion and removal of properties on the List of World Heritage in DangerFootnote ¹⁶ and the deletion of properties from the List.

As of August 2012, there are 962 World Heritage Sites: 745 cultural sites, 188 natural and 29 mixed properties located across 157 States Parties. There are now 38 sites on the World Heritage in Danger List, most being concentrated in Africa. There are many more cultural sites listed than natural ones, a product of the historical development of the list, which is now being actively remedied. The list is also historically dominated by properties in Europe,Footnote ¹⁷ although there have been vigorous efforts from the WHC and the Committee to create a more representative list. Some of those efforts include a new “upstreaming process” that was suggested at the 33rd sessions in Seville in 2009,Footnote ¹⁸ designed to assist underrepresented countries in preparing robust conservation dossiers and identifying the criteria for OUV, optimally leading to successful inscription. This could serve as a powerful mechanism to empower indigenous groups to showcase their heritage sites, but only with national government support, because only UN States Parties that have ratified the Convention can nominate properties to the World Heritage List. UNESCO is first and foremost an intergovernmental organization.

As stipulated in the 1972 Convention, serious decision-making heft has been traditionally given to the recommendations of three external advisory bodies, comprised of international experts who conduct site visits and evaluations: ICCROM, ICOMOS, and IUCN. ICCROM was set up in 1959 as an intergovernmental organization dedicated to the conservation of cultural heritage and is only involved in state of conservation reporting in a limited manner. ICOMOS was founded in 1965 and provides evaluations of cultural and mixed properties proposed for inscription on the World Heritage List. Both ICOMOS and the IUCN are international NGOs. IUCN was established in 1948 and provides technical evaluations of natural heritage properties and, through its worldwide network of specialists, reports on the state of conservation of listed properties. These bodies communicate their findings in lengthy reports online and in briefer presentations at the international meetings.

For the last two years, I have been an official observer at these sessions and have reported on the political machinations and national agendas that have eclipsed issues surrounding archaeological heritage and connected communities.Footnote ¹⁹ With the growing dominance of strategic political alliances within the Committee of 21 states, the recommendations of the advisory bodies have been increasingly overturned and publicly derided.Footnote ²⁰ Throughout this article I focus primarily on the cultural, rather than natural, properties and management, since the latter would require a more substantive engagement with global initiatives including conservation, biodiversity, and community-based management.Footnote ²¹

Vociferous critiques of the World Heritage system may seem like much-needed critical postcolonial interventions against what is seen to be a traditionally European-dominated organization.Footnote ²² They may also be read as overt attempts to displace the northern hegemony that has historically characterized the World Heritage List in historic terms. For those States Parties leading the challenge, this could be seen as a revolution against the so-called expert adjudicators and their role in the contest that site nomination has become. Since ICOMOS has been criticized for being too white and European,Footnote ²³ this could be positioned as a strategic defiance of long-held hegemonic positions on the places where world heritage is located, how it is understood, and the ways in which it can be legitimately practiced and lived. This could indeed be liberating, particularly for traditional and living heritage. Yet in the sessions I have either attended or analyzed, the properties being debated inhabit the familiar taxonomies of chateaux, churches, mosques, historic centers, forts and, to a lesser extent, archaeological excavations. The question remains, can such challenges drive substantive revisions to the Convention's core mission or will they be fleeting challenges that merely serve nationalistic goals that are themselves reliant upon the composition of the Committee?

Senior UNESCO figure Laurent Lévi-Strauss recently commented that UNESCO is moving from a “monumentalist” position to a more “anthropological” one.Footnote ²⁴ This move has much to do with pressures from nonstate actors, who are largely indigenous people, and their particular understandings of cultural heritage. The shift was signaled to some degree by the creation of a new category of heritage within the 1972 Convention for Cultural Landscapes that incorporates the “combined works of nature and of man.”Footnote ²⁵

This extension of the original typology of cultural sites (monuments, groups of buildings, sites) reflects the evolution of the concept of heritage in many regions of the world.Footnote ²⁶ According to the then-director of the WHC in Paris, the creation of this new category resulted from changes in the traditional view of heritage as “monument,” linked to European history, to include heritage concepts applicable to all regions of the world.Footnote ²⁷ To date, there are some 97 cultural landscapes on the World Heritage List, famous examples being Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (Australia), Konso Cultural Landscape (Ethiopia), and Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (South Africa). While growing in popularity and potentially a powerful tool for local practices and place-making,Footnote ²⁸ such nominations do not necessarily solve the wider problem of indigenous heritage sites per se. Moreover, some critics claim that the cultural landscape category may serve to essentialize indigenous people and values as inherently tied to the land, or to project a unified and simplistic image of indigenous groups.Footnote ²⁹

Indeed more than a decade ago, discussions about cultural landscapes had already identified the need for some advisory body of indigenous experts, given the traditional knowledge and management practices required for those particular properties.Footnote ³⁰ These experts could advise on the appropriate identification, evaluation, and management of mixed properties and cultural properties with indigenous associations plus the identification, management, and possible renomination of properties listed for their natural World Heritage values that may also hold indigenous values. And, as the situation described at the opening of this article reveals, powerful and knowledgeable representatives like the German ambassador to UNESCO have a poor understanding of indigenous practices and heritage forms, as well as living heritage and their attendant contextual values. To date there is little official input from indigenous authorities to the World Heritage Committee. Their primary involvement remains as stakeholders (named or not, consulted with or not) in the nomination dossiers or state of conservation reports prepared by States Parties and brought before the Committee. Significantly, they are more likely to be given a voice regarding the natural heritage properties than in cultural properties, because their plight has garnered the support of environmental NGOs and agencies worldwide. What does this shortfall mean for the relationships between world cultural heritage and indigenous people, and how did UNESCO arrive at such a situation?

OPPORTUNITY LOST: THE FATE OF WHIPCOE

In December 2000, a World Indigenous Peoples Forum was held in conjunction with the 24th session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in Cairns, Australia. Representatives from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand harnessed the momentum of these events and their location to propose the formation of a new committee, the World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts (WHIPCOE). The initiative was taken in response to concerns voiced by indigenous peoples to their lack of involvement in the development and implementation of laws, policies, and plans for the protection of their knowledge, traditions, and cultural values that apply to their ancestral lands, within or comprising sites now designated as World Heritage properties.Footnote ³¹ Following on from these initial discussions in Cairns, an indigenous peoples working group with representatives from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand further developed the idea in a paper that was presented to the 25th session of the World Heritage Committee held at UNESCO's Paris Headquarters in June 2001.Footnote ³²

During the Paris meeting, delegates from Thailand and Zimbabwe expressed their concern about the implications of WHIPCOE for site inscription and conservation processes. Both nations were concerned that this could lead to the establishment of another permanent mechanism acting as an advisory body to the Committee. Thailand argued that there were only a few countries in the world where interventions by such a Council may be needed. They asserted that internal agreements among the heritage authorities and the indigenous communities themselves would be more appropriate in such cases. The delegate of Zimbabwe, endorsing statements by Thailand, raised a further question about the definition of the term “indigenous.” Moreover, he questioned whether it was realistic to expect that the States Parties would have a chance to undertake a serious study of this proposal and provide comments by the time of the next Committee session. In response to this pushback, Canada countered, applauding the efforts of the working group and calling for more voices to be heard in the world heritage process. Ways had to be found, Canada imputed, to involve advisory bodies and States Parties to work with these new perspectives.Footnote ³³

The United States stressed that the establishment of WHIPCOE might affect a large variety of States Parties and sites—the scope of which had yet to be fully realized. This was particularly pertinent to properties inscribed according to Cultural Criterion vi: sites “directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance.” Underlining the importance of defining the term “indigenous,” the U.S. representative stated that this critical issue could lead to one of the most important developments in the application of the World Heritage Convention. Australia suggested further work would continue on the definition and that the issue go forward to the Committee for discussion as a policy matter. Australia concluded by reiterating that these issues were of importance to their country and to all people working to protect the treasury of our global heritage. It was decided that the working group would include indigenous representatives from Australia, Belize, Canada, Ecuador, New Zealand, the United States, and the secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity along with representatives from ICOMOS, IUCN, ICCROM, the UN Indigenous Peoples Working Group, the WHC, and other interested parties. The chair formally closed the discussion by noting that the WHIPCOE proposal represented a critical moment for the world heritage movement.Footnote ³⁴

Unfortunately, any decision whether to formally constitute the indigenous council was then held over yet again to the next bureau meeting in Winnipeg, Canada, in September 2001. Despite the glacial rate of change within UNESCO, there were signs that a global council could effectively prioritize and oversee the protection of indigenous knowledge, traditions and cultural values at World Heritage sites. By all accounts they had the support of the WHC and some critical States Parties including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, those nations renown for establishing indigenous heritage partnerships. That same year Australian ICOMOS issued the Statement on Indigenous Cultural Heritage proposing that indigenous people be effectively involved in decisions affecting their heritage, and in managing places significant to them.Footnote ³⁵ Finally, tribute was paid to the work of the Indigenous Peoples Working Group and it was recommended that the proposal to establish WHIPCOE should be formally considered by the 25th session of the World Heritage Committee in Helsinki in December 2001.

Some months later in Winnipeg 20 participants discussed the merits and potentials of WHIPCOE. A representative from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights underscored the history and position of indigenous issues within the greater UN system. Representatives of ICOMOS, ICCROM, and IUCN offered overviews of their mandates, structures, processes, activities, and existing working relationships and interaction with indigenous people. During the plenary discussion, numerous suggestions were made for possible roles for WHIPCOE within the World Heritage process. These included ensuring full consultation with local people, strengthening the management of existing sites, promoting intangible cultural heritage and traditional knowledge, and assisting with crafting management guidelines and participating in the nomination and evaluation of sites.Footnote ³⁶ A council might afford opportunities for training, specifically sharing successful indigenous site management approaches and practices between groups internationally. Perhaps more radically, a council might provide expertise concerning the interests of cultural and/or minority groups as distinct from States Parties. It could build connections with UNESCO's advisory bodies and between other UN agencies, conventions, and agreements. The ambition was, no less, to herald in new era of relationships between traditional people and the World Heritage system,Footnote ³⁷ on national and international scales, which tacitly entailed navigating the issues of state sovereignty.

Again no decision was taken, and instead, reports would be drafted, texts finalized, definitions and operating procedures outlined. The final progress report was then translated and placed on the WHC secure website accessible to the 21 committee members and the advisory bodies.Footnote ³⁸ Additionally, the director of WHC, Francesco Bandarin sent letters and reports to individual States Parties and invited their comments.Footnote ³⁹ The results were presented in Helsinki at the 25th session of the World Heritage Committee in December 2001.Footnote ⁴⁰ A cogent statement of purpose was outlined coupled with WHIPCOE's proposed functions, structure, membership, reporting, and funding sources.

The responding letters, only nine of which were sent and held on record, reflect the particular nationalist concerns and ethos of individual states. They are an indictment of the problems that the UN nation-state structure affords and its inability to grapple with citizens within states, nonstate actors, minorities—especially indigenous minorities—and to attenuate affective connections across borders. Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, and Iceland commended and supported the proposal.Footnote ⁴¹ Israel purported no comment, but was concerned over the definition of “indigenous.” Finland hoped such a council would not impinge upon the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and that the financial arrangements would be clarified.

The United States chose to defer its comments till after the proposed Winnipeg meeting and similarly refrained from submitting a list of sites on the World Heritage and Tentative Lists that “have indigenous peoples issues.”Footnote ⁴² They claimed to “have a clearly defined legal relationship to indigenous peoples that would render it inappropriate for us to submit such lists without consulting them.”Footnote ⁴³ This proves both a convenient and ironic deflection in retrospect given that the United Nations sent a mission in 2012 to evaluate the scope of infringement of basic human rights accorded to Native Americans in the United States. It is a clear and familiar example of one nation's defense of its territorial sovereignty, its resistance to international jurisdiction and internal minority self-determination, in limiting the scope of a progressive global initiative. More ironic still was that between 1984 and 2003, the United States had formally withdrawn from UNESCO and was merely occupying observer status.

While the US view may not seem surprising given its historic relationships with native peoples and antipathy toward the UN system,Footnote ⁴⁴ the scale of France's objections seem excessive. First, France objected to the institutionalization of a council on legal, practical, and financial grounds. Second, they claimed the issue of indigenous people was adequately covered within the UN system through the UN Economic and Social Council adopted Resolution 2000/22, the Establishment of a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Described as a problem of institutional coherence, they cited “unwieldy bureaucratic procedures, for an issue which only concerns a limited number of States Parties and which can be treated by other means.”Footnote ⁴⁵ They expressed concern over jurisdiction, participation, and authority. Yet the key issue was the “problem of sovereignty.”Footnote ⁴⁶ France's position was that indigenous issues should be “resolved in the framework of the Rules and Procedures of the States Parties concerned. It is for the authorities of these States to establish discussion groups aiming at an improvement, if necessary, of the participation of indigenous peoples in the definition and implementation of the measures for the identification, protection and management of the properties concerned—in conformity with the criteria of the Convention.”Footnote ⁴⁷ France recalled Resolution 2000/56 of the UN Commission for Human Rights that encourages governments to establish national committeesFootnote ⁴⁸ and not international organs.

France may seem historically removed from indigenous affairs, yet there are sizeable groups within their borders who are considered indigenous, such as the Bretons and also the Basques. Notably they have not ratified the International Labour Organization convention on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, Convention 169, nor has the United States. Sovereignty is indeed the problem and, like the United States, France refuses international scrutiny of their domestic policies over ethnicity, difference, and multicultural diversity. It is estimated that at least half of the “European countries do not involve local stakeholders in the preparation of their Tentative Lists and at least two thirds draft their Lists without any public consultation.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The possibility of an advisory council of indigenous experts potentially crossing national lines in solidarity over one nation's properties, even though they would have had to be nominated in the first instance by States Parties, was deemed intolerable. The moment for connection and a powerful global alliance of indigenous representatives had passed—dashed by two nations whose motto is, ironically, liberty and equality.

In Helsinki this negative mood was echoed by the 21-body Committee: Argentina, Belgium, China, Colombia, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, Saint Lucia, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Zimbabwe. Perhaps the result would have been different if the composition of the Committee had been different and involved States Parties like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. And since Committee procedure is framed by strong consensual and conservative elements, the outcome should not be surprising. Nonetheless, a number of Committee members, observers, and the representatives from the advisory bodies commented that indigenous peoples have a special role with respect to certain World Heritage properties and that a network could provide a positive forum for an exchange of information and experience concerning their protection.Footnote ⁵⁰

Ultimately, the Committee reiterated problems relating to the WHIPCOE's funding, legal status, and authority in regard to the States Parties, advisory bodies, the Committee, and the WHC.Footnote ⁵¹ The thorny definition of “indigenous” resurfaced again coupled with the relevance of such a distinction in different regions. Given this pushback, the Committee did not approve the establishment of WHIPCOE as either a consultative body of the Committee or as a network to report to the Committee.Footnote ⁵² The Committee further denied funding for a second meeting to discuss WHIPCOE as proposed in WHC-01/CONF.208/13. Instead, they recommended that “indigenous peoples could meet on their own initiative, be included as part of State Party delegations to the Committee and were encouraged to be involved in UNESCO's work relating to the intangible heritage.”Footnote ⁵³ Such a dismissal imputes that (1) indigenous people should organize themselves separately since their contributions are not deemed mainstream procedurally; (2) that they resign themselves to the positions adopted by their sovereign states, often likely to be against their own interests; and (3) that indigenous contributions pertain only to intangible “living traditions,” rather than tangible heritage sites and places.

The issue of an indigenous expert network, however, is not going to simply disappear. Writing in 2012, Heuheu, Kawharu, and Tuheiava argue that the need is ever more pressing and that the political climate has changed from the previous decade. First, they point out that 148 nations have now signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Second, the World Heritage Committee has formulated “community” as a strategic objective.Footnote ⁵⁴ There is talk that UNESCO will prepare a new statement on indigenous peoples, and in its 40th anniversary year it further urges States Parties to “involve indigenous peoples and local communities in decision making, monitoring and evaluation of the state of conservation of the properties and their Outstanding Universal Value and link the direct community benefits to protection outcomes [and] respect the rights of indigenous peoples when nominating, managing and reporting on World Heritage sites in indigenous people's territories.”Footnote ⁵⁵

OTHER ROUTES

Former WHC director Francesco BandarinFootnote ⁵⁶ indirectly questions the hegemony of statist structures, by asking whether the heritage that lies outside the jurisdiction of States Parties might be supported indirectly, by establishing links with other international legal tools, or developing partnerships with institutions and organizations expressed by civil society? This opens the door for potential non-State Party support and site nomination, but it remains to be seen if such properties would be inscribed under the auspices of the nation. It is indeed desirable to imagine this process, yet it rather confounds the underlying structure of a UN organization.

In a much-cited landmark case, the Mirrar aboriginal community directly petitioned UNESCO headquarters and convinced the bureau to send a mission to investigate the detrimental impacts of the Jabiluka uranium mine on indigenous living traditions as well as the environment.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Lydon evocatively describes,Footnote ⁵⁸ a UNESCO mission then visited Kakadu and Canberra, and the following month handed down its finding that the Jabiluka mine posed serious threats to the cultural and natural values of the Kakadu World Heritage Area. This led to the unprecedented threat of placing a property on the World Heritage in Danger List without the consent of the State Party, representing a significant challenge to state sovereignty and an international embarrassment to the Australian government. These moves garnered support from a coalition of Green movements across Europe and international indigenous, social activist, and environmental groups.Footnote ⁵⁹ Then in 2011, Jeffrey Lee, traditional owner of the Djok (Gundjeihmi) clan, spoke directly to the Committee in the UNESCO Paris meetings: He was petitioning for Koongarra to be inscribed on the List as part of Kakadu National Park, which indeed it was. It is likely that natural heritage properties like Kakadu entreat more protection and global attention because of conservation and biodiversity issues as opposed to archaeological sites. However, this example may signal the mobilizations that also could be operationalized for cultural properties if an indigenous council of experts had been formed in 2001.

I recently spoke with a number of senior officials at UNESCO headquarters about the related issue of human rights, specifically indigenous rights and those of connected communities around World Heritage properties. Given that there is now in force a Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People,Footnote ⁶⁰ ratified by some 150 nations, surely there could be some provision within the mechanism of the 1972 Convention to make nations accountable if groups were being forcibly relocated, marginalized, persecuted, or even excluded from the socioeconomic benefits of their own heritage places. This would have real consequences for indigenous groups as well as other local and minority communities and their rights to restitution and self-determination. Perhaps not surprisingly, opinions were mixed. Some felt that States Parties would never allow such discussion at the heritage forums, and would quash immediately the invocation of the rights charter in terms of national heritage. This would mean it would be impossible to delete a property from the World Heritage List if there were violations. Another set of interviewees, some of the most senior members of the Secretariat, suggested that there might be a route to holding states accountable to the larger Committee when sites were being nominated. Indeed, there are more rigorous provisions now for determining whether States Parties are including all the relevant stakeholders, working closely and equitably with communities, and sharing benefits. As I have seen myself through the nomination and inscription process at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, a site I work at in central Turkey, both ICOMOS and the WHC take such negotiations very seriously.

But what of the nations themselves? Speaking at the 11th session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in May 2012, Agnes Leina (Il'Laramatak Community Concerns) spoke directly to UNESCO about indigenous groups affected by the selection World Heritage Sites. She underlined the need to obtain the free, prior and informed consent from indigenous peoples regarding the choosing of World Heritage Sites on traditional lands and territories. The three sites she listed, Western Ghats (India), Sangha Trinational (Congo/Cameroon/Central African Republic), and the Kenya Lake System in the Great Rift Valley (Kenya), have subsequently been inscribed by the Committee on the World Heritage List in 2011 and 2012.Footnote ⁶¹ Leina contended that all three properties were nominated without the meaningful involvement or participation of affected communities. Instead these problems had been “unresolved, unaddressed or ignored altogether.”Footnote ⁶² She urged the World Heritage Committee to set aside its decision until those peoples were consulted. Moreover, Leina indirectly invoked the ghost of WHIPCOE, calling for the establishment and involvement of an indigenous advisory body in the evaluation of all nominated properties situated in the territories of indigenous peoples and in monitoring the conservation and management of such World Heritage properties. At the 2012 World Heritage Committee meetings in Russia there was considerable debate over the issue of affected communities, and yet indigenous concerns were still trumped by the interests of even postcolonial states like Kenya and India, their positions backed by their allies on the Committee.

Voting to remove a site already inscribed on the List may be impossible on the grounds of deleterious treatment of communities and would not find the support of States Parties on the Committee, who ultimately have the final vote. However, in theory, it may be possible not to inscribe a new site if affected communities were marginalized or not properly consulted. This was the argument put forward by Australia ICOMOS in 2001,Footnote ⁶³ that without free, proper and informed consent (FPIC) sites could not be nominated.Footnote ⁶⁴ As the above scenario demonstrates, we have yet to see such measures enacted in World Heritage sessions, but as the foothold of new nations takes hold it may provide an effective mechanism for members of the Committee to make public the plight of indigenous peoples and shame countries into attending to their concerns, much like what happened in the Kakadu case with Australia.

Returning to the inescapability of nation-state sovereignty, the possibility for the aforementioned radical developments recognizing indigenous communities rests entirely upon the composition of the Committee of 21 States Parties. As outlined above, those Committee members rotate every four years and fashion alliances on the basis of region, religion, economics, and historical (often colonial) linkages. While one can never truly predict the voting alliances and transnational pacting, from recent Committee sessions, it seems likely that there will continue to be a strong anti-European, antitraditionalist stance toward heritage definitions, values and even conservation policies.

Considering the future possibility of a global indigenous network to advise on World Heritage, no one denies that there is a considerable and growing body of shared expertise, successful management strategies, and alternative understandings of heritage and heritage connections across natural and cultural properties. As the continued desire for WHIPCOE underscores, webs of indigenous interaction may be proliferating, so too the traffic in ideas and findings, yet the impossibilities of actual instrumentalization are what I find compelling. How can organizations like UNESCO be empowered to not only endorse but to execute rights-based strategies, much like they moved on Palestinian recognition and sovereignty—albeit after many decades of campaigning? What structurally impedes this progression? The short answer is the bounds of the Convention, which is in itself a treaty that can have “no third-party effect unless this is clearly intended by States Parties and consented to by third states.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Certain nations seem strongly receptive of additional changes to the operational guidelines and the larger UNESCO structure generally, evinced repeatedly in the last two annual World Heritage Committee sessions. But ultimately these goals are frustrated and impeded by the interests of nations, by the desire for consensual and diplomatic solutions and thus by the UN structure itself, in terms of its very definition and mandate.

Perhaps there is a more fundamental divide too: The possibilities for indigenous collaboration across state lines are complicated by particular local cultures, national legal framings, histories of oppression and relationships with the state. These fraught specificities, while unifying in sentiment, can also impinge upon implementing international processes and legislation. Whether one is talking about universal human rights or world heritage, these seemingly global elements (universal and world) remain stymied by statism. The issues of who counts as indigenous and whose voices are heard remains critical. Some indigenous groups find themselves represented by international NGOs, whose representatives often have no lived connection to the people or places in question. Other groups become the fleeting concern of organizations primarily committed to environmental campaigning rather than community rights or broader heritage desires. Many marginalized groups within nations may not identify or be positioned as ethnically indigenous, but have longstanding claims to land and place and still require protection and representation. All of these connected communities call for global redress and rights, and yet international processes like World Heritage must be vehicles to further alienate and victimize them at home when delegations return and conferences come to a close. Returning to Ambassador Nibbeling-Wrießnig's sentiments at the opening of this piece—at the present moment, powerful Western nations on the World Heritage Committee might be willing to extend offers of help and their own brand of expertise, but they remain reluctant to embrace a network of indigenous experts who could effectively address and attend to problems in their own countries, and indeed globally.