World Heritage of Minas Gerais: Challenges and Opportunities for Its Management

Abstract

Heritage is a conflictive field by nature. What heritage do you decide to preserve? Who does it? Who is opposed to it? How is it preserved? How does the scholarship dialogue with local communities? How do you educate yourself on heritage? What mechanisms are put into play for its conservation? UNESCO conceptualizes the management plan as the legal, administrative and strategic tool that preserves those values of the sites that the stakeholders have prioritized at a given moment. It contemplates various functions: sustainability, benefits of heritage conservation for human development, being forward-looking, and dynamic. What effects can disasters have on World Heritage properties in general and on these properties in particular? We highlight the necessary dialogue between international documents and the declared World heritage in the state of Minas Gerais. Disaster risk management (DRM) deals not only with the protection of heritage assets against major threats but also with the reduction of underlying vulnerability factors, such as lack of maintenance, inadequate management, progressive deterioration, or the absence of ecosystem protection zones, which can turn hazards into disasters. DRM should be an integral component of the management of any World Heritage property and linked with disaster management systems at the local, regional and national levels. Due to its high complexity, it requires the greater inclusion of possible stakeholders and processes of mediation, conciliation and capacity building before the disaster, during and after the disaster. The Living heritage approach (Poulios 2010) based on “Functional continuity” emphasizes the change in continuity as an overcoming between the past and the present that frequently does not allow a holistic and complex glimpse of the conservation of the property.