UNESCO

Now published:

Holtorf, Cornelius (2023) Towards a World Heritage for the Anthropocene. In: N.Shepherd (ed.) Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times: Coloniality, Climate Change, and Covid-19. Routledge.

The 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention was created to contribute to peace and security in the world. However, contrary to the original intentions, world heritage sites are in practice not considered as the world’s shared heritage but frequently championed by their respective nation-states which focus on distinguishing ‘our’ from ‘their’ heritage and thus reinforce existing divisions. In this chapter, I discuss what could be done to adopt a more people-centred approach to world heritage. One approach is to introduce participative decision-making in the selection process. Another is to adopt new criteria for selecting global world heritage that serve better the interests of humanity and indeed the original intentions of UNESCO with the Convention. I present some concrete suggestions for such criteria and three examples of world heritage that might then be selected.