The limits of soft cultural power
Guarding precious and vulnerable places is one of the better things the UN’s cultural agency does—but it may topple over if it stretches too far

ANYONE who dreams of exercising authority (of a fairly benign sort) over the entire world—with a special remit for the planet’s most beautiful and fragile places—will enjoy perusing the 250 or so pages that contain the latest pronouncements from UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee.

Alamy

Swooping elegantly from the valleys of the Andes to the walled cities of Europe, from misty Chinese mountains (like Emei, pictured above) to lawless African game parks, the document doles out scoldings, warnings and praise to politicians, curators, animal conservationists and mayors. Some are congratulated for following the UN cultural agency’s advice; others are given dark hints of what will happen if sites do not receive proper care.

This year’s most dramatic move was a rare decision to strip a place—Dresden and the surrounding Elbe valley—of its status as a “World Heritage Site”: that is, a location deemed to be of universal worth to humanity by virtue of its built environment, ecological importance or both.

The German metropolis, belatedly restored to its Baroque glory after massive wartime bombing, was punished because of a motorway bridge that threatens to wreck the skyline. (The only other place to have been delisted is an antelope sanctuary in Oman, where the government actually wanted to renounce the status.) Meanwhile UNESCO accepted 13 new sites, including a sacred peak in Kyrgyzstan and a fortress in Burkina Faso, bringing to 890 the number of places under its purview.

What makes this whole procedure tolerable (and indeed, respected) is that it is a voluntary arrangement between governments, with groups of states taking turns to form committees that duly exercise UNESCO’s moral power. At least in theory, it is not the permanent staff of the World Heritage Centre (a smallish part of the UNESCO bureaucracy) who exercise dominion over the glories of the earth, but the 186 states that have ratified the World Heritage Convention and thus signed up to the notion that some places are too precious to be left at the mercy of one government alone.

An architect with a fondness for old cities that are evolving, Mr Bandarin relishes the memory of his sparring matches with Ken Livingstone, then mayor of London, whose love for skyscrapers cast a shadow over the Tower of London and the Palace of Westminster, both of which are UNESCO sites. “He wanted to build Shanghai in London,” the Italian says of the maverick socialist mayor. What UNESCO should be protecting, he says, is not stones but human values; cities must develop in ways that cater to present needs but also respect and integrate the past.

The UNESCO practice of naming and shaming works well in countries with vigorous domestic disputes—like Ireland. Having been forced by UNESCO to defend their stewardship of a monastic island, Skellig Michael (see article), the authorities in Dublin are now keen to prepare more sites for UNESCO approval and raise their hitherto weak profile in the agency.

The soft power of UNESCO can also work in authoritarian states (including post-Soviet ones, like Azerbaijan) where internal discussion is muted but international opprobrium is unwelcome.

But the process breaks down in countries where governance hardly exists. One of UNESCO’s big disappointments, Mr Bandarin says, was the ineffectiveness of its efforts—along with several other agencies—to preserve a rare white rhinoceros at Garamba national park in Congo. At one point, UNESCO and its partners were paying wardens in banknotes flown from Kenya; but that system broke down.

Places where tourism and other economic activities are expanding uncontrollably may also trample on UNESCO’s high principles, which seek to preserve the integrity of sites and their surroundings. In China a UNESCO endorsement translates quickly into tourist revenue—and all manner of strange tourist-pleasing activities.

On the Emei mountain, for example, visitors now see not only a famous Buddha statue, but a series of man-made caves with copies of other Chinese Buddhas—and nearby there is a brand-new statue of Shiva, an unrelated Hindu deity. “You have to peer at the plaque closely to see whether the object in front of you is Han dynasty or 21st century,” in the wistful words of one recent visitor.

Short of an outright delisting, UNESCO can put sites on a “danger list”. Sometimes this is done in co-operation with a government (as happened this year with Colombia’s Los Katios park, threatened with deforestation); and sometimes such a listing is a way of admonishing a government. For example, Georgia was told this year that it is not taking proper care of the ancient ecclesiastical centre of Mtskheta.

UNESCO likes to boast of the mind-concentrating effect of the mere suggestion of delisting. Under pressure from the agency, the Greek authorities were dissuaded from building an aluminium plant near the site of the Delphic oracle and Egypt held off from building a highway near the Pyramids of Giza.

But as the number of sites nears 900, will not the currency of UNESCO’s praise and scoldings be devalued? It is embarrassing for Dresden to be the only place delisted against its will; but if half a dozen cities decided to ignore UNESCO’s ire and proceed with their own development plans, that could make the agency look foolish and toothless.

At a minimum, UNESCO’s best hope of preserving its moral authority must surely lie in much deeper co-operation with independent agencies and private donors. Mr Bandarin says the agency is happy to pool its efforts with NGOs and private foundations. The only initiative in the field that he does not welcome is a competition which a Swiss-based foundation launched to choose the “seven new wonders of the world” by electronic ballot. This seemed to be benefiting from UNESCO’s work, while doing little for the cause of conservation.

Embarrassingly, one of UNESCO’s closest partners—the Geneva-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature—issued a report this year suggesting that the UN agency was too hesitant to declare sites in peril, and too sensitive to the feelings of member states. Putting it more bluntly, Jeff Morgan, director of the California-based Global Heritage Fund, says UNESCO presents too rosy a picture of the world when it implies that only a handful of significant sites are at risk. “UNESCO’s cause is noble, but they have done too little to raise awareness of the destruction going on,” Mr Morgan says. “The reality is that few sites in the developing world comply with all UNESCO’s rules.”

He also thinks UNESCO has been too cautious about co-operating with private business, although the UN agency has a modest partnership with Expedia, an online travel firm. Lobby groups with a narrower remit—to protect animals or conserve architecture, for example—have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate sponsorship. UNESCO may fail to save the world’s patrimony unless it swallows its scruples and does likewise.