On the construction of outstanding universal value : UNESCO's World Heritage Convention (Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 1972) and the identification and assessment of cultural places for inclusion in the World Heritage List

Abstract

On 16 November 1972 the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), meeting in Paris, France for its seventeenth session, adopted the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage - commonly referred to as the World Heritage Convention. This study investigates the definition and construction of World Heritage value, ("outstanding universal value) as the central and distinguishing feature of the World Heritage Convention. It is important to acknowledge that it is not only the value or significance of a place that is constructed but also the intellectual and administrative tools used to identify and assess this value. This simple but fundamentally important notion is crucial if World Heritage is to be understood in any detail. It is a notion that provides the overarching structure with which to communicate this study's research concerning the history of the origins, drafting and implementation of the Convention. Particular attention will be given to issues relating to the identification and assessment of cultural places for inclusion in the World Heritage List. In exploring the origin of ideas that were to be embodied in the World Heritage Convention, particularly that of common cultural heritage, and the historical development of the Convention itself: it is argued that the Convention developed in a climate characterized by the meeting between national and international interests (in the early work of the League of Nations and later in the work of UNESCO). In presenting the origins and development of the World Heritage Convention's definition of cultural and natural heritage of "outstanding universal value", particular attention is given to the Convention's definition of immovable cultural heritage as "monuments", "groups of buildings" and "sites". This study presents and discusses the development and continuing redrafting of criteria for the assessment of “outstanding universal value" included in the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, from 1976 to December 1994. This study also presents a broad analysis of the World Heritage List as an expression of the World Heritage Committee's attempts to construct a universally representative World Heritage List and as an expression of the construction of "outstanding universal value". In surveying the World Heritage Committee's convoluted attempts to maintain the integrity of the World Heritage List as a list of places of truly "outstanding universal value", the new "Global Strategy for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention" is introduced as a new anthropological and global approach to the establishment of the List. This study highlights recent attempts to extend the limits of the World Heritage List to ensure the inclusion of cultural landscapes of "outstanding universal value". The successful renominations of Tongariro National Park in New Zealand and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia as cultural landscapes are shown to represent moves to venture beyond the simple limits of the natural and the cultural as categories of place and beyond the limits of constructing "outstanding universal value" as cultural or natural value. The study concludes with comments concerning the continuing fluidity of the construction of "outstanding universal value".