This is a really interesting book for anyone concerned with world heritage and not just in Southeast Asia. A warning, though—it is not something to just dip into casually. Rather, it is a detailed look at the nitty-gritty management issues at a range of sites across the region. It thus covers a variety of scenarios in a range of jurisdictions with quite different histories of heritage management. The volume grew out of a five-year research program funded by the United Kingdom and includes previously unpublished results from British and local Southeast Asian team members as well as material from other colleagues who share research interests with the team. The work includes natural, as well as cultural, heritage sites. This is unusual as most treatments stick with one or the other and so perpetuate a long-term and increasingly unsatisfactory division of labor between those working on these two aspects of world heritage. It is a credit to the editor and other contributors that they recognize that this division needs to be bridged if world heritage is to move forward in a sustainable manner; but more on such matters later—first, the contents.

The book has 16 chapters. The first is Victor King’s introduction as the editor. It is followed by 11 chapters covering cultural sites. The last of them concerns cultural landscapes and so forms a neat link to the final four chapters, which focus on natural sites. The whole thing is wrapped up by a postscript by another of the project leaders, Michael Hitchcock. Last of all are the combined references for all chapters and an index. In order, the cultural chapters cover Luang Prabang in Lao (two), Hoi An in Vietnam, Vigan in the Philippines, Melaka and George Town in Malaysia (one each), Ayutthaya in Thailand and Muara Jambi (one), Prambanan and Borobudur (one) in Indonesia. The cultural landscapes article concerns Bali in Indonesia. The four “natural” chapters examine cases in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia respectively and in that order.

King’s comprehensive introduction ably sets the scene for the volume, articulating it with current debates surrounding heritage, in general, and world heritage, in particular, both globally and specifically in relation to Southeast Asia. A strong link is drawn with heritage tourism, which has come to the fore around the planet over recent decades as governments insist that heritage should be put to work to defray the costs it incurs or even to turn a profit. As made plain by a number of the book’s case studies, income generation through tourism and related development rather than conservation has become the primary raison d’être of heritage listing, including at the world heritage level.

Notwithstanding the obvious tension between tourism and conservation, heritage practitioners have bought into the rhetoric of “heritage as a driver of development.” In doing so, they have posed a serious threat to their own conservation efforts. This is because, despite their hopes that they can manage the contradictions and generate income to support conservation, experience on the ground almost always sees the money syphoned off for unrelated purposes by governments and other interests. This leaves heritage managers largely up to their own devices to face the increased pressures upon it from sometimes vast numbers of tourists. This is certainly true across Southeast Asia, as repeatedly and unambiguously demonstrated by the details presented in the main chapters of this work.

A second and related point emphasized by King and fleshed out in the following chapters is the way in which governments frequently tie heritage sites, and especially cultural world heritage sites, to national identity. In doing so, the authorities regularly exclude local people from the sites, either in terms of their input into decisions about the properties or in terms of their physical presence in and around the sites and often in both ways. This practice goes hand in hand with using heritage to drive development through tourism, because tourism and development policies more broadly are generally created and implemented at the national and other supra-local levels and then presented top down to local people as a fait accompli with which they must comply. The case studies in the book make it abundantly clear that this situation always has negative consequences, as often impoverished local people—sometimes including site-level heritage managers—subvert government diktats in various ways.

Alert visitors to any of the sites described in this book, and, indeed, any other world heritage property in Southeast Asia, can see this for themselves, in the form of temporary and not-so-temporary structures and activities such as fishing, horticulture, timber cutting, and hawking in places where such things are forbidden. These prohibitions are introduced despite the importance of such activities to the livelihoods of local people, who more often than not have been displaced from ancestral lands by a government declaration that their lands contain valuable heritage. However, several of the chapters in the book also show that, at the same time that local people who can ill afford it are being excluded in this way, governments often turn a blind eye to allow, or even encourage, commercial interests to develop inappropriate large-scale infrastructure such as hotels in and around protected areas.

So what is to be done? King notes at the outset that “the project [and by implication this book] has a policy and practical dimension … intended to draw out lessons for best practice” (8). Indeed, two of the chapter headings make this explicit, Akpedonu’s “Lessons from Vigan” and Miura’s Angkor piece subtitled “What to Develop and How to Sustain It?” Hitchcock’s postscript draws the main threads together: “[T]he most pressing issues” he writes “comprise the institutional problems prevailing in developing countries” (380). These problems, however, are not to be sheeted home solely to those struggling institutions. The standards against which their performance is measured are by and large those of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its world heritage framework, which has long been acknowledged as a Western, and specifically European, construct. As Hitchcock notes, one of the book’s contributors goes “so far as to use the term UNESCO-isation … to refer to the tendency to ‘aestheticise’ what has been worthy of World Heritage consideration” (382).

The implication, of course, is that UNESCO and the world heritage system have to change. This is not news, least of all to UNESCO and world heritage practitioners. However, while the book shows how various problems arising partially or largely from “UNESCO-isation” manifest themselves in the case study sites, and point to certain possible ways forward, it does not offer detailed prescriptions regarding policy and practice. Indeed, it does not engage to any significant degree with much of the burgeoning literature on these sorts of matters emanating from UNESCO and, particularly, the World Heritage Centre and its Advisory Bodies, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, the International Union on the Conservation of Nature, and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property. Thus, the reference list captures only a small handful of the sources regarding world heritage policy and procedure and the experiences of world heritage professionals that would have been useful had the contributors taken a more overtly applied approach. Despite King’s nod to such matters, though, and chapter titles such as those mentioned, the volume is still very much an academic one.

This observation is just that—an observation—rather than a criticism. Most academic treatments of the issues canvassed in this book are relatively short journal articles or book chapters, which usually cannot do full justice to the details of the research behind them. The great value of a work such as this one is that it is intended to provide the sort of in-depth consideration we so often miss in short-form academic reporting and critique. It thus provides the basis for strong engagement with the world heritage framework and the sorts of questions and literature that it itself does not consider at length. This can only mean that any such engagement in future will be firmly founded on empirical results. For that I thank the editor and other contributors. This work should definitely be added to the bookshelf of (and actually read by!) anyone with a serious interest in world heritage, and heritage more generally, in Southeast Asia and globally.