UNESCO’s Tangled Web of Preservation: Community, Heritage and Development in China

ABSTRACT

In the past two decades the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has broadened its focus on heritage from tangible sites to intangible cultural practices. It has also, according to supporters, advocated for the inclusion of local residents at heritage sites in management plans, emphasised the need to promote and protect human rights, and sought to balance preservation and conservation with what it terms “social and economic” needs. This article examines these claims via a case study on world heritage in China. It is suggested that UNESCO’s embrace of community involvement in heritage management is underpinned by a reliance on two fictive categories: an “international community” that agrees on heritage policies and a fictive homogeneous “local community” assumed to share the institutional values of UNESCO. This in turn reflects assumptions found at the centre of UNESCO’s cosmopolitan project going back to its establishment in 1948.

KEY WORDS:

• World heritage
• China
• displacement
• UNESCO
• preservation
• community development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I recognise the scepticism of those who question evoking cosmopolitanism at a time of global conflicts, which arguably are reactions to the cosmopolitan project. I believe that the existence of these conflicts does not undermine the efficacy of cosmopolitan debates but instead demonstrates the continued presence of cosmopolitan claims. The entire United Nations system as well as its companied organisations are firmly situated in an ideological commitment to a transnational order.

2. ICCROM was established in 1956 to train heritage managers and monitor World Heritage properties. ICOMOS was established in 1965 and tasked with evaluating cultural nominations. The IUCN, established in 1948, is the largest and most well-funded of these agencies, with more than 1,000 member organisations.

3. As Hafstein (2014, 29) reminds us, the international campaign for intangible heritage protection was facilitated at the state level in the 1970s by the military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. During his rule, the Bolivian state sought to transform indigeneity into “folkloric spectacle” as a means of solidifying political and social control.