Keywords

1 The “Social Turn” in World Heritage and the Need for Education

Since its adoption in 1972, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage – henceforth World Heritage Convention – has proven a remarkable, global success story. At the time of its adoption, many societies faced the destruction of heritage on account of rapid modernization and fundamental economic and social change, thus technical processes of identification, protection and conservation of heritage put forth by the World Heritage Convention were – and are still – much needed. In the meantime, a total of 1154 properties around the world have been listed and protected by the 194 State Parties to the World Heritage Convention, ranging from State Parties inscribing up to 58 properties on the list – such as Italy – to 27 State Parties ratifying the World Heritage Convention, but not inscribing any properties so far. The World Heritage Committee’s Global Strategy (1994) takes cue from these global and structural imbalances, showing that emphasis needs to shift away from “identification, protection, conservation, presentation” to social processes, as it is reflected in the 2002 Budapest Declaration (UNESCO, 1972, Art. 4; World Heritage Committee, 2002). The Budapest Declaration aims to strengthen the World Heritage Convention by introducing “Four Cs”: increasing credibility of the World Heritage List as well as enhancing capacity building and communication, thereby effectively conserving World Heritage. This “social turn” in World Heritage was reinforced in 2007 by the addition of the “Fifth C” – communities – aiming to enhance the role of communities in the implementation of the World Heritage Convention (World Heritage Committee, 2007). It is becoming clear that such a “social turn” with the enhancement of community involvement needs educational programmes to provide the necessary knowledge and skills, as required by the World Heritage Convention (1972, Art. 27) itself:

States Parties to this Convention shall endeavour by all appropriate means, and in particular by educational and information programmes, to strengthen appreciation and respect by their peoples of the cultural and natural heritage defined in Articles 1 and 2 of the Convention.

Although educational programmes have been set down in the World Heritage Convention, systematic implementation started relatively late with the founding of the World Heritage Education Programme (WHEP) in 1994 – in line with the World Heritage Committee’s Global Strategy. William Logan (2012, 21) comments on this late initiative:

The early lack of urgency is perhaps surprising. If the world’s cultural heritage and diversity are to survive beyond the current generation of decision-makers and professionals, it would seem critically important to enable the next generation – today’s young people – to appreciate the value of maintaining heritage in its various tangible and intangible forms and to bring them into the work of heritage protection and maintenance.

However, it was not until the turn of the millennium that World Heritage Education (WHE) received political and institutional attention (Dippon & Siegmund, 2010, 36). The idea of education was subsequently set down in different formal instruments and procedures of the World Heritage process: since 2005, the Operational Guidelines differentiate between awareness-raising and education and define the latter as the “development of educational materials, activities and programmes” (UNESCO, 2019, Art. 219). Although education is not an obligatory part of a World Heritage nomination, it is highly recommended to integrate it into the mandatory management plan (UNESCO, et al., 2013, 125), and State Parties to the World Heritage Convention are asked to provide information about their educational strategy and activities in Periodic Reporting (UNESCO, 2015a, 5). Parallel to this formal embedding of education in World Heritage procedures, didactical and practical actions for WHE were implemented in the framework of WHEP. WHE is a complex construct, working on different levels and involving various actors across the globe. In the following section, we focus on WHE as it is implemented by the World Heritage Centre (WHC) in the framework of WHEP since there is currently no readily available data on the practical operationalization of WHE across the world in schools and at World Heritage properties.

2 The World Heritage Education Programme and Its Current Pitfalls

The aim of the WHEP is “to encourage and enable tomorrow’s decision-makers to participate in heritage conservation and to respond to the continuing threats facing our World Heritage” (UNESCO WHC, 2021). The WHEP consists of five different elements: (1) World Heritage Volunteers, (2) Youth Fora, (3) Media/Communication Training, (4) a Cartoon Series and (5) one Educational Resource Kit for Teachers (UNESCO WHC, 2021; Vuijcic-Lugassy, 2018, 38 f.). Table 36.1 shows the status of the respective elements’ implementation:

Table 36.1 Implementation of UNESCO’s World Heritage Education Programme
Full size table

As can be seen in Table 36.1, WHEP’s main elements are (1) the camps of World Heritage Volunteers and (2) the Youth Fora at the World Heritage Committee Sessions. Both take place on an ongoing basis and reach a significant number of young participants from all over the world. The action camps are hands-on and conservation-oriented, while the Youth Fora are more political, giving young people opportunities to meet heritage professionals and to raise their voice in the context of the World Heritage Committee Sessions.

The other three elements (3–5) aim to enable students and teachers to transmit the World Heritage idea either through trainings or educational material. These latter three all lack recent updates and ongoing activities: Media/Communication Training only took place in 2013, 2014 and 2015; the Educational Resource Kit was last updated in 2002 and the Cartoon Series Patrimonitos World Heritage Adventures in 2012. During the last 10 years, no trainings have taken place, and no new teaching material has been published.

Among the five elements of WHE, the Educational Resource Kit is still considered “the most important tool” of WHE (Vuijcic-Lugassy, 2018, 38). The Educational Resource Kit for Teachers aims to “impart to students the desire to know, cherish and act in favor of World Heritage conservation” (UNESCO, 2002, 18, original emphasis). It focuses on three objectives:

to encourage young people to become involved in heritage conservation on a local as well as on a global level; to promote awareness among young people of the importance of our common World Heritage and of the UNESCO, 1972 World Heritage Convention; and to develop effective educational approaches and materials […] in order to introduce WHE into the schools […] in all parts of the world. (UNESCO Bangkok, 2010, 39).

The Educational Resource Kit offers a good starting point for making teachers and students aware of the topic. However, it is mainly focused on the actual hands-on process of conserving properties for future generations. Current challenges to World Heritage, such as reconstruction in conflict areas, terrorism, illicit trafficking and climate change, are not covered. Neither does it reflect the progress in teaching methods, nor does it consider links to more recent educational discussions in the field, like Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) or Global Citizenship Education (GCEd). With the adoption of Agenda 2030 in 2015, the importance of World Heritage and also education in and for sustainable development was brought to the fore. On the one hand, the protection of World Heritage was anchored in aim 11.4 of Agenda 2030, and, on the other, a sustainable development perspective was integrated into the World Heritage Convention by the eponymous Policy Document (UNESCO, 2015b). Changes in education for operationalizing Agenda 2030 were set down in aim 4.7, and UNESCO took a leading role in developing and promoting ESD.

While it can be assumed that there is a certain time lag in new topics and policies being integrated into current programmes, we found that a discussion of educational themes and policies – which do not focus exclusively on conservation – is not taking place among the professional World Heritage community. Our review of UNESCO’s publications World Heritage Review, the Paper Series and Resource Manuals showed that there is no online publication on the topic WHE as of July 2021. UNESCO’s publications largely focus on nomination, conservation and management of properties. Topics related to education – such as interpretation, communication, capacity building, community involvement, tourism or sustainable development – are addressed in several UNESCO publications, but a comprehensive educational approach based on either Art. 27 of the World Heritage Convention or Agenda 2030 cannot be found in these publications.

The lack of guidance on WHE is reflected in the most recent results of Periodic Reporting from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) (2013) and Europe (2015). A total of 60% of the World Heritage properties in the LAC region and 40% of the sites in Europe reported to have no educational programme or work on an ad hoc basis (UNESCO, 2013, 103; UNESCO, 2015a, 58). In Europe, 20% of the cultural sites reported having an educational programme, and another 40% reported having an educational programme, which only partially worked and needed improvement (UNESCO, 2015a, 58). The actors of the European World Heritage properties identified education as a potentially serious management issue, which would require attention by the World Heritage Committee (UNESCO, 2015a, 63).

Having examined the reports of the WHC on the implementation of the World Heritage Committee’s decisions, we found that there is no operational action plan or strategy on WHE as of August 2021. The latest report prepared by the WHC for the 44th World Heritage Committee Session merely summarizes the different actions of the WHEP and mentions that WHE shall be given the highest priority for the 2022–2025 period (UNESCO, 2021, 18). Apart from this report, no decision of the World Heritage Committee on WHE exists. There are no references to Art. 27 in the preparatory documents for the World Heritage Committee whatsoever.

Concluding our analysis on WHE and WHEP, we see a fundamental lack of theoretical and practical guidance regarding new developments, which may even threaten the success of the World Heritage project in the coming years. Apart from the Youth Fora and the hands-on workshops of the World Heritage Volunteers, the overall concept of WHEP – as reflected in the Educational Resource Kit – seems to be frozen in time and stands isolated from recent developments in both fields of heritage and education. Although the potentials of merging WHE and ESD have been recognized, no conceptual basis has been developed to implement them in practice. In short, UNESCO has neglected the implementation of Art. 27 of the World Heritage Convention and WHE remains an educational niche concept, which seems to have no significance for the professional community. Nor does WHE play any significant role in ESD, UNESCO’s most prominent educational approach. Realizing this, one must ask whether WHE is a priority for UNESCO after all.

3 The Two Paradoxes of World Heritage Education and Their Potential

Despite our critique of the implementation of WHEP, we consider WHE an important concept, which is grounded in the educational potential of the World Heritage properties themselves. It is frequently proposed by UNESCO, heritage professionals and academics that World Heritage properties are places of learning (Dornbusch et al., 2018; Ströter-Bender, 2010, 72; UNESCO WHC, 2021). The properties’ Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) as well as their authenticity offer visitors “the opportunity […] to engage in experiences that make them learn” (Van Lakerfeld & Gussen, 2011, 15) and “history to touch” (Schefers & Vieregg, 2010, 19). By personally exploring the properties, visitors can learn about history and values in the context of the property. Notwithstanding, there is a scarcity of scholarly literature dealing with the theoretical foundations of such learning processes and heritage education (Van Boxtel et al., 2016 2; Doorsselaere, 2021, 2). This is reflected in a corresponding lack of concepts in WHE. This lack of concepts has a profound influence on the implementation of WHE in practice: heritage education carried out in schools is most often limited to national or local history (Doorsselaere, 2021, 1) or arts education (Gesche-Koning, 2018, 9 f.), with the concomitant risk of limiting and instrumentalizing heritage in hegemonic narratives of cultural supremacy. The potential of heritage – and especially World Heritage – in and for education is thus not fully realized.

For WHE, this situation is aggravated by the paradoxical fact that World Heritage properties are always local properties, which are situated in territories of State Parties. Even though the World Heritage Committee recognized the current 1154 cultural, natural and mixed World Heritage properties (as of July 2021) for their outstanding value to all humanity, the global dimension cannot be fully assessed from a local perspective because it belongs to an “ideal” of human achievement, which is introduced by the World Heritage Committee in the nomination process. This paradoxical confusion of the local and the global, as well as the particular and the universal in World Heritage properties, throws light on the second paradox, the status of the relationship between the universal and the particular. This second paradox cannot be easily reconciled through normative intervention as Raymond Williams (1961/2011, 61) fittingly observes in the framework of analyzing cultural expressions:

There is […] the ‘ideal’, in which culture is a state in the process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values. The analysis of culture, if such a definition is accepted, is essentially the discovery and description, in lives and works, of those values which can be seen to compose a timeless order, or to have permanent reference to the universal human condition.

In this “ideal” sense, the totality of World Heritage properties can be understood as a canon of unique properties, offering exemplary opportunities to discover the potential of human development. Such an “ideal” of universal value – while politically and practically desirable – is theoretically unsatisfactory, not least because it can be instrumentalized as a goal in political projects and hegemonic narratives. Without theoretical grounding, such “ideals” of the World Heritage Convention run the risk of arbitrariness and being subject to the political power plays and geo-political ambitions of State Parties, seriously jeopardizing World Heritage as a project of the world community.

Consequently, from a general educational perspective, the notion of an “ideal” must be shifted away from hierarchical and normative goal orientations of human development towards the qualities of the development process itself and the historic nature and openness of this process (Benner, 1987/2015). Kant (1803/2007, 437 & 439), in his lectures on pedagogy (1803), already emphasized that human qualities can only come into existence through education, thus emphasizing the need for educational activities, which would be able to introduce desirable qualities into human development. Such educational activities – due to their necessarily historic and cultural nature as “social reactions to the fact that human beings are developing” – have to differ from place to place and in respect to the social norms and values of local communities (Bernfeld, 2012, 51). These paradoxes of WHE are shared to a bigger or lesser extent by other educational approaches aiming at a global context, such as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) or Global Citizenship Education (GCEd).

In this paradoxical situation for WHE, we suggest that an approach of “minimal morals” may clarify the status of the relationship between the universal and the particular, the global community and the State Party and society and the individual, considering the diversity of human and biotic development processes (de Waal, 2013). According to de Waal (2013, 178), such morality may be based on the two principles of “not hurting” and “helping”, which should govern both one-on-one relationships and group relations. While such minimal morals can be indefinitely extended into the future, they do not readily offer answers to questions on the quality of future developments. However, we hold that such answers can be derived from this minimal morality. From an educational perspective, this would have to include the right of the younger generation – and generations to come – to live their lives unhurt by the present, older generation. At the same time, it would require the present, older generation to help the younger generation not to fall behind what has been achieved by previous generations. Failure to do so would hurt the younger and coming generations without their knowing. Here education and heritage – and especially World Heritage – can play a crucial role because heritage properties manifest what may be possible to achieve in the future by showing what has been achieved in the past. This includes a non-positivistic, non-hierarchical, contra-factual dimension, opening up perspectives for transforming human thought and action without being governed by present conditions and needs. Consequently, a minimal morality would be able to reconcile the paradoxes of WHE, serving as a starting point to tap into the future-oriented potential of WHE.

There is significant future potential in WHE’s connection to diversity and identity work. Heritage is actively used by people to construct their identities by transforming, adapting and re-using heritage for their own purposes, as well as transforming themselves in the very process (Van Boxtel et al., 2016, 2). This process is described by Laurajane Smith (2006, 1) as “heritage work”. As a result, heritage becomes a meaningful element in the mosaics of people’s identity and/or culture. The particular potential of WHE in the context of heritage work is to use World Heritage properties to create a local sense of belonging with a transnational or global outlook. Thus, WHE can serve as a starting point to learn about oneself, relate to others and gain an understanding of the diversity of identities and cultures. Consequently, the potential of WHE for young people lies not only in showcasing what former generations have achieved but also in enabling them to create a sense of belonging for themselves, to understand the present and to “consciously write their future” (Penna, 2018, 4).

In summary, the future potential of WHE does not lie in acquiring factual knowledge about World Heritage properties, their conservation or management, but in understanding how the properties came to be, their meaning for local and global communities and what opportunities they may offer for shaping the future. In the context of minimal morality, the potential of WHE can be mapped in terms of ESD. ESD aims to equip people with the knowledge and skills to sustainably shape their futures within their respective environments. In this sense, the aim of WHE is not to create conservation experts but to empower people to be “knowledgeable enough to make sound decisions about the preservation of their environment” (Penna, 2018, 7). Implementing a sustainable development perspective into WHE can thus provide occasions for acquiring and sharing key competencies and qualifications (Ströter-Bender, 2010, 13; Van Lakerfeld & Gussen, 2011, 9). Applying these considerations from the context of ESD to WHE opens World Heritage properties for educational processes, global learning and sustainability, by translating the slogan “act local, think global” into concrete educational experiences.

4 Perspectives on Improving WHE

This contribution focused on emphasizing the relevance and importance of WHE for sustainably safeguarding World Heritage today and in the future, on showing its current pitfalls and on tapping its potential for education. This last section provides an outlook on how WHE can be improved to better realize the potential of Word Heritage for education and vice versa. We see such improvements in mainly two interrelated dimensions: the organizational strengthening of WHE within the UNESCO system and increasing theoretical and practical efforts to conceptualize and implement WHE.

To close the current gap between the potential and the actual implementation of WHE, UNESCO and the WHC should actively prioritize WHE and the implementation of Art. 27 of the World Heritage Convention. Common decisions by the World Heritage Committee, implementation strategies and action plans, as well as the allocation of staff and funds, are essential to this end. Making WHE a priority from 2022–2025, as set out in the report of the WHC at the 44th World Heritage Committee Session, can be a starting point to strengthen the role of WHE within the World Heritage Programme.

As has been shown in this contribution, the lack of grounding in educational theory and educational approaches is currently one of the main pitfalls of WHE. Unsolved paradoxes between the global and the local – as well as the universal and the particular – prevent WHE’s wider application and the building of synergies between WHE, ESD and GCEd. Therefore, priority should be given to the development of theoretical foundations for WHE. With our minimal morality approach, we offer one such possibility. From our considerations on the cultural and historic nature of education processes, we recommend a modular approach to WHE, which is grounded in local cultures. Rather than updating the existing Educational Resource Kit for current needs, we hold that different modules are better suited to reflect upon the diverse educational settings and different actors in WHE across the globe. The different modules would be able to present a wide range of topics and approaches in WHE, while being flexible enough to integrate recent developments and debates in education and heritage. For example, such a modular approach could adapt the aims, methods and content of other educational approaches, such as ESD, to WHE.

Reflecting our analysis of paradoxes of World Heritage and practical experiences gathered through self-conducted intercultural education projects at European transnational World Heritage sites, the following perspectives seem essential to tap the future potential of World Heritage in education and vice versa (Institute Heritage Studies, 2021a, b). These perspectives build on topics and approaches to WHE, which the WHEP has not focused on so far. At the same time, they bring specific questions into focus which can be addressed by educational activities.

Perspective on the Global Story

The global meaning of World Heritage sites manifests itself in the OUV; however, the OUV is presented in the technical language of the WHC. To be used in educational contexts, this language needs to be translated into narratives which connect the local and the global. The following questions are in the focus of this perspective: What is the global meaning of World Heritage sites? How are they connected across the globe? How do World Heritage sites inform about universal values and human and biotic development on this planet?

Perspective on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

World Heritage can contribute to the SDGs by showing sustainable development in the past and how World Heritage is presently threatened by unsustainable development. This perspective can also reveal conflicting goals – such as heritage conservation versus necessary heritage adaptation in the context of climate change. The following questions are in the focus of this perspective: How do World Heritage sites show sustainable livelihoods on this planet? What sustainable solutions to everyday problems are represented in their materials and processes? What kind of social processes contributed to the continued – and therefore presumably sustainable – safeguarding over the span of several hundreds of years?

Perspective on Transnational Educational Approaches

The 42 inscribed transboundary World Heritage sites are nominated by at least two different State Parties and offer perspectives which transcend national borders, potentially opening up a global perspective. The following questions are in the focus of this perspective: What does this shared World Heritage mean for people of the different involved State Parties? What are differences and similarities in interpretation? How can the property be jointly safeguarded?

Perspective on Evaluation and Impact Assessment

Evaluation and impact assessment of WHE can help to better understand the effects of educational activities, like volunteer camps, resource kits, workshops, media campaigns etc., on young people. The following questions are in the focus of this perspective: How did people’s attitude towards World Heritage change through participation in WHE activities? Which measures were successful and which were not? What are indicators of successful WHE, and how can the impact be measured?