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The politicization of UNESCO World Heritage decision making

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Abstract

The purpose of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention is to protect the global merit good of cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value for humanity. Many observers, however, have suggested that this international organization is subject to politicization as the selection process of sites on the World Heritage List is increasingly driven by countries’ political influence and national strategic interests. This article explores this possibility quantitatively by analyzing a unique dataset containing information from the summary records of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s sessions over the 2003–2012 period. Focusing on the difference between technical experts’ recommendations and Committee final decisions on new additions to the List, our empirical analysis addresses four main theoretical questions: (i) Does the World Heritage Committee follow the advisory bodies’ recommendations for the evaluation of heritage sites? (ii) Does Committee membership or size of national delegations influence the addition of sites to the List or an upgrade of the initial technical evaluations? (iii) Is the Committee’s decision regarding the selection of World Heritage sites driven by a country’s political and economic power? (iv) Do close political and economic relationships between countries influence Committee members’ behavior? The paper contributes to Public Choice literature on international organizations by providing new evidence on the role of political and economic interests in decision making concerning global merit goods.

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Notes

  1. In the sociological literature, addressing the concept of cultural and natural wealth, Reyes (2014) analyses the determinants of the World Heritage List applying a similar quantitative approach.

  2. Inscriptions on the World Heritage List started in 1978. Summary records of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee sessions are only available from 2002 onwards.

  3. Site Referral occurs when some minor additional information is needed to supplement the original nomination. Deferral entails a major revision of the nomination dossier and a new expert assessment of the property.

  4. Interestingly, three of these cases involved nominations presented by only one country, that is Israel. While the small number of cases for this type of decision does not allow to infer a statistically significant bias against this specific country, Becker et al. (2015) have empirically tested the existence of a similar bias in UNGA resolutions and provided a theoretical explanation of this phenomenon based on expressive voting behavior.

  5. In our analysis we focus only on verbal interventions whose content expresses a judgment by a Committee member over a nomination dossier according to the four evaluation categories used in the selection process. Thus, we rule out those verbal statements referring to requests of clarification by Committee members to either advisory bodies or the secretariat.

  6. We excluded from the analysis nominations of mixed properties owing to divergences between Advisory Bodies’ recommendations or in the final decision regarding either the natural or cultural component of the nomination. Nominations of mixed properties account for about 4 % of all the nominations submitted to the World Heritage Committee in the period 2003–2012.

  7. Arguably, the evaluation categories do not follow a constant ordinal scale in their values. For instance, the difference between a recommendation for Not Inscription instead of a Deferral is allegedly larger than the difference between a Deferral and a Referral, because with Not inscription a country loses the chance to nominate the site on the next Committee sessions.

  8. The political globalization dimension is computed through a composite index including (i) the number of embassies and high commissions in a country, (ii) the number of international organizations to which the country is a member, (iii) the number of UN peace missions a country participated in and (iv) the number of treaties signed between two or more states since 1945. The index range from 0 to 100 with higher values indicating more political integration of a country at the global level.

  9. As described before, some nominations receive no formal discussion. For this reason the information in this dataset refers to a smaller sample of nominations. A deeper data examination shows that out of 47 nominations which have not prompted any verbal statements by Committee members, 35 have been already recommended for inscription by the Advisory Bodies. As we are concerned in detecting instrumental behavior by Committee members, we expect that these types of nominations are the ones leaving less room for politicized decisions.

  10. Melitz and Toubal (2014) have constructed two separate measures of language proximity which they label LP1 and LP2. The former calculates linguistic proximities on the basis of the Ethnologue classification of language trees between trees, branches and sub-branches. The latter, more sophisticated according to the authors, is based on analyzing lexical similarities between lists of up to 200 words of two different languages. We have adopted this latter measure.

  11. UNESCO’s Member States are organized in five regional groups—Africa, Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and North America and Latin America and the Caribbean—following definitions which are not only geographical and slightly differ from UNGA regional groups (see http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/worldwide/).

  12. Another possibility is to use conditional logistic regressions to directly control for country fixed effects. However, the use of this statistical model causes some drawbacks for our analysis. First, it generates convergence problems with the small dataset of 290 individual nominations. Second, when dealing with the dataset on verbal interventions, taking into account country fixed effects causes the drop of observations in cases the observations from a nominating country display all positive or negative outcomes in the dependent variable. Because the number of verbal interventions received by countries nominating sites is highly unbalanced, the risk is to lose substantial information concerning explanatory variables from observations of specific countries. Further, this approach also rules out time and country invariant factors that can be relevant to keep in the analysis of the World Heritage decision making process.

  13. See also Meskell et al. (2015) for relevant examples of the entanglement between World Heritage Inscription and international recognition.

  14. Typically, vocal support for nomination proposals during Committee sessions is part of a wider process of support that begins during the initial stages of the nomination process, with technical and/or financial assistance funneled to former colonies through Fund in Trust agreements with UNESCO.

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Acknowledgments

We thank four anonymous referees and the participants to the European Workshop of Applied Cultural Economics and to the annual meeting of the European Public Choice Society for their insightful comments and suggestions. We would like also to thank our colleagues at the World Heritage Center, ICOMOS, ICCROM, and the IUCN as well as the many national delegations who have taken time to meet with us. Lynn Meskell would like to acknowledge Keble College, Oxford University where she was Senior Research Visitor and the American Academy in Rome where she was Senior Scholar in Residence. Her fieldwork was also supported under the Australian Research Councils Discovery scheme (The Crisis in International Heritage Conservation in an Age of Shifting Global Power - DP140102991). Claudia Liuzza wishes to acknowledge fieldwork support from the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Europe Center, The Center for Philanthropy and Civic Society, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and the Stanford Archaeology Center.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Statistics “Cognetti de Martiis”, University of Torino, Lungodora Siena 100, Torino, Italy

    Enrico Bertacchini & Donatella Saccone

  2. Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University, Main Quad, Building 50, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Claudia Liuzza & Lynn Meskell

Authors
  1. Enrico Bertacchini
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  2. Claudia Liuzza
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  3. Lynn Meskell
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  4. Donatella Saccone
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Correspondence to Enrico Bertacchini.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 Description and sources of explanatory variables
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Table 8 Summary statistics of variables
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Bertacchini, E., Liuzza, C., Meskell, L. et al. The politicization of UNESCO World Heritage decision making. Public Choice 167, 95–129 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0332-9

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