Blue Helmets for Culture: Involving Communities in the Protection of Their Heritage

Abstract

The Memorandum regarding the Italian task force (ITF) in the framework of UNESCO’s Global Coalition Unite4Heritage was formally entered into force on 16 February 2016. While congratulatory articles on and high expectations of the “Blue Helmets for Culture” (BHC) initiative, which was how the ITF came to be known, spread like wildfire, the task force remains nonoperative 18 months later. While the operational guideline negotiations are still underway, and as such also the concrete features of the ITF’s operationalization, I argue that the BHC initiative’s ultimate success will depend on reaching out and involving the local communities whose heritage they will attempt to protect. In line with diverse scholarship on cultural heritage management, as well as the guidelines and strategic objectives of the World Heritage Committee on the same, I argue that civil society’s participation and engagement can mean the difference between success and failure in BHC’s performance in protecting heritage. Furthermore, BHC can become an important site for operationalizing an exercise of local community involvement. The outcome of this exercise, I argue, would be providing states with a concrete set of examples in which local community involvement would be assessed as positive not only in theory but also in practice. This would help to curtail states’ reservations, real or imagined, against concrete measures of implementing local communities’ participation and involvement in protecting heritage.