Discussion on World Heritage and Tourism

Introduction

There is certainly a complex and longstanding relationship between World Heritage and tourism. Although tourism is mentioned only once among the 38 articles of the 1972 “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” (UNESCO, 1972), it has been significantly impactful in the day-to-day practice of site management. It has long underpinned how World Heritage Sites are perceived, encountered, and experienced in broader social and political perspectives. More than 40 years since the Convention, the consideration of tourism as an active variable in the production and consumption of World Heritage has shifted from being implicit to becoming ever-more explicit in both policy and practice.

World Heritage and Tourism

There are numerous sites on the World Heritage List in India and abroad which, despite their importance for tourism, do not attract significant numbers of tourists due to reasons such as protection, daily management, or issues of physical and perceptual access. The designation of world heritage status may fall upon sites, particularly urban ones, which already have some degree of tourist activity. However, it is difficult to think of World Heritage Sites without imagining swarms of tourists taking photographs, lines of parked tour buses, and attendant souvenir stalls. Any type of tourist arriving at a World Heritage Site is confronted by the realities of tourism: significant numbers of tourists along with a service sector that has developed in scale and scope to meet the needs of the temporary but recurrent tourist population.

Challenges and Impacts

Beyond the signs of the long-term attrition of physical fabric and litter, there are immediate markers of excess tourists. The negative impact of tourism tends to be cumulative and hidden, revealing itself rather subtly through price inflation, community displacement, and acculturation. More directly and visibly, there is the process of infrastructure development associated with tourism. Although not necessarily within the boundaries of World Heritage Sites, such developments can impact the quality of the site (Leask & Fyall, 2006). Within the tourism literature, considerable attention has been given to studies exemplifying the problems tourism poses to the physical fabric of cultural and natural heritage sites and the socio-cultural well-being of nearby local communities. Such tourism studies have both fed and been fed by a pervasive discourse suggesting that tourism is, de facto, a threat to World Heritage. The impacts of tourism, whatever their extent, are assessed, measured, and managed. Wider geopolitical questions are raised regarding the category of World Heritage Sites itself and whether there is indeed some degree of causality between site designation and the ability to attract tourists.

Diversity and Management

“World heritage sites are not homogeneous and their management is not monolithic” (Bourdeau, Gravari-Barbas, & Robinson, 2011; Di Giovine, 2009). They differ considerably in terms of their reputation, the extent of the tourism flows around them, and the extent to which the state and related actors contribute (Ashworth & Van der Aa, 2006). It is this diversity, against the uniformity of production and at the nexus between the global and local, that creates an interesting ‘heritagescape’ (Di Giovine, 2009) and a fascinating field of research (Djament-Tran, Fagnoni, & Jacquot, 2012).

Marketing and Communication

The entanglements between tourism and World Heritage are evident across the marketing and communication networks that pervade both the developed and developing world. Many kinds of destinations, whether on a national or regional scale, privilege “World Heritage” among their inventories of attractions to visit, acting from genuine national pride but also from the knowledge that these sites carry additional appeal for the tourist market. Tour operators devise routes and itineraries to include World Heritage Sites as highlights, and there are operators that specialize in packaging World Heritage sites as their centered itineraries. The British-based company Hurlingham Travel offers what it presents as the “World’s Most Expensive Vacation” (at $1.5 million) to see all of the World Heritage Sites in “luxury,” cutting through some 157 countries. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) itself plays into the realities of the iconic role of World Heritage Sites in national tourism marketing campaigns and frequently carries advertisements for country destinations in its World Heritage Magazine. These advertisements frame World Heritage sites and landscapes not only as having particular values requiring protection but also as travel-worthy places for tourists to visit. UNESCO is caught up in the dilemma of promoting World Heritage Sites while simultaneously seeking their protection from the excesses of tourism. In 2008, for instance, UNESCO collaborated in the publication of the popular promotional guide 1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die (Cavendish, 2008), which, while offering a preface by the then Director-General of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, warning of the dangers of poorly managed tourism, nonetheless provided a highly visible promotional message. Guidebooks similarly give prominence to World Heritage in their prescriptive narratives of destinations.