The ‘world heritage race’: a critical review of the world heritage nomination and inscription process : achieving a way forward to fulfill its strategic objectives

Abstract

The year 2022 was a milestone that embodies the endeavours of all the member states and UNESCO for half a century, it also becomes a critical point and sees the needs and musts to review the system itself. Today, the World Heritage successfully celebrates a list of 1154 sites all over the world for years. The current list possesses a foreseeably great deal of diversity, from transboundary sites to culture landscape, from industrial heritages to modern architectures. The system also gains creditable importance in the world, which favourably contributes back to the public and the sites themselves. However, a trend of ‘World Heritage Race’, which presumably be called, has also been witnessed growing among member states of the United Nations. The ‘race’ refers to the dim and competitive nature spread around the world, as an analogy reluctantly from the fevers of space race, military race and nuclear race during the cold war times. These days, both the academic scholars and the UNESCO officials have begun to address these unusual tendencies urgently: such as, inscription with self-interests, global-divided strategy and irresponsibility. The ‘Five Cs’, being the basic consensus in the Strategic Objectives, have been taking the heavy mission of remedying these kinds of directions. The tragedies in the last century have presented us the lesson, that the competitions for augmenting self-interests are a strategy never considered in a vision long-term. The questions are to be posed: Has the world abused the World Heritage system for self-interests? Is the World Heritage system still in good health, and if not, could it be rectified? The research for this dissertation is qualitative, which is focused on understanding the world’s ‘inner psychology’ regarding the mechanism operation of the World Heritage. The theoretical basis for the research is based on the World Heritage Convention, and in particular, focusing on the latest Strategic Objectives – The ‘Five Cs’. As this study aims to provide in-depth learning intending to have a health examination together with prescriptions for this mechanism, the focus would be most recent issues with the World Heritage nomination and inscription process, focusing on the problematic nature in the process that has developed. And the scope would be identifying and analyzing the health of the most relevant C – Credibility amongst the Strategic Objectives of the World Heritage and develop rectifying recommendations.