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Shifting the balance of power in theUNESCO World Heritage Committee: anempirical assessmentEnrico Bertacchinia, Claudia Liuzzab & Lynn Meskellca Department of Economics Cognetti De Martiis, University ofTorino, Torino, Italyb Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA,USAc Department of Cultural & Social Anthropology, StanfordUniversity, Stanford, CA, USAPublished online: 02 Jun 2015.

To cite this article: Enrico Bertacchini, Claudia Liuzza & Lynn Meskell (2015): Shifting the balanceof power in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee: an empirical assessment, International Journalof Cultural Policy

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1048243

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Shifting the balance of power in the UNESCO World HeritageCommittee: an empirical assessment

Enrico Bertacchinia*, Claudia Liuzzab and Lynn Meskellc

aDepartment of Economics Cognetti De Martiis, University of Torino, Torino, Italy;bDepartment of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; cDepartment of

Cultural & Social Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

(Received 4 March 2015; accepted 27 April 2015)

This article analyzes whether emerging nations are extending their influenceacross the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and, if so, how this affectsdecision-making processes concerning the inscription of sites on the WorldHeritage List. We use both quantitative and qualitative approaches to identifypatterns in decision-making processes regarding inscriptions at the WorldHeritage Committee sessions. Our results suggest that in the last decade, agroup of emerging powers including China, South Africa, Russia, and India hasdominated the UNESCO World Heritage decision-making process. At the sametime, our results suggest an increasing ‘politicization’ of decisions emergingfrom the polarization of positions concerning the role and legitimacy of Advi-sory Bodies’ technical recommendations. Our finding contributes to discussionsof the role and contribution of the BRICS countries in challenging the existingstructures of multilateral governance by presenting the example of WorldHeritage, UNESCO’s self-proclaimed flagship program.

Keywords: UNESCO; World Heritage; international relations; politicalinfluence; BRICS

JEL Codes: F53; F55

1. Introduction

Adopted in 1972 by the UNESCO General Conference, the Convention Concerningthe Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the Convention) repre-sents an international effort that seeks to encourage the identification, protection,and preservation of cultural and natural heritage considered to be of outstandingvalue to humanity. This international agreement is rooted in the recognition thatprotection of cultural and natural heritage of outstanding universal value (OUV)often remains incomplete at the national level, as countries lack the economic,scientific, and technological resources for preservation. The implementing mecha-nism envisioned by the Convention for identifying heritage sites of ‘OUV’ tohumanity is based on the inscription of sites on the World Heritage List (the List).Inscriptions of cultural and natural sites on the World Heritage List are the result ofa selection process that occurs during the annual World Heritage Committee meet-ings. Here, experts from UNESCO’s official Advisory Bodies (International Council

*Corresponding author. Email: enrico.bertacchini@unito.it

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1048243

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on Museums and Sites [ICOMOS] and International Union for Conservation ofNature [IUCN]) present technical evaluations. However, the 21 States Partieselected to the World Heritage Committee make the final decision. Since enteringinto force in 1975, the World Heritage Convention has enabled a growing systemof international cooperation for the protection and promotion of heritage sites onthe List. Today, the Convention is considered the foremost international legalinstrument for the protection of global heritage of OUV (Titchen 1996, Jokilehtoand Cameron 2008, Labadi 2013). As of 2015, some 191 countries have ratifiedthe Convention and a total of 1007 properties have been inscribed on the WorldHeritage List.

In the last two decades, the World Heritage Convention has been increasinglysubjected to criticism by the World Heritage Committee members and other StatesParties (Askew 2010, Brumann 2012, Meskell 2012, 2013). The List has been longrecognized to be unbalanced with regard to the type of inscribed properties and thegeographical areas of the world that are represented (Labadi 2007, Bertacchiniet al. 2011, Frey and Steiner 2011, Labadi 2013). The great majority of inscriptionsare cultural sites and most World Heritage is located in developed regions, in par-ticular in Europe and North America (UNESCO 2007). In this respect, some com-mentators have stressed how criteria for site inclusion may be culturally biased,notably toward Western conceptions of heritage (Musitelli 2002). Furthermore,European and North American States Parties have been elected for a far greaternumber of terms in the World Heritage Committee than countries from other worldregions (Strasser 2002).

While Western and developed countries have long dominated the WorldHeritage arena, it has been noted that in the last years there has been an increasing‘politicization’ of the selection process by States Parties. This is evident both interms of the disagreement between expert evaluations and the decisions of theWorld Heritage Committee, and the polarization of positions between Committeemembers in the site selection process (Jokilehto 2011, Meskell et al. 2015). As aresult, the listing of properties increasingly reflects national rather than global inter-ests (Ashworth and van der Aa 2006). One possible reason for this is that, similarto other UN platforms and international organizations, decision-making within theUNESCO World Heritage Committee is witnessing a shift toward greater multipo-larity (Wade 2011, Hale et al. 2013). As many developing and transitional countrieshave grown faster than developed countries in the last decade, these new andemerging players are taking advantage of global heritage issues in the internationalarena to pursue their strategic national interests (Bayne 2011).

Since the pioneering work of Cox et al. (1973), an extensive literature hasaddressed both qualitatively and quantitatively how political influence and position-ing of states affect the decision-making process within international organizations.One set of studies has analyzed voting behavior and decision-making in interna-tional organizations to assess competition between blocs and the role of dominantcountries, with particular reference to United States (Voeten 2000, Hug and Lukács2014). Other studies have highlighted how nations linked through trade or aid tothe United States or G7 countries are likely to align in their voting patterns withthe dominant state’s preference in international arenas (Kuziemko and Werker2006, Dreher et al. 2008, McKeown 2009, Stone 2011, Dreher and Sturm 2012).More salient for our analysis, recent scholarship has also demonstrated how influ-ence has evolved and been exerted in international organizations by emerging

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powers, in particular by those countries subsumed under the acronym of BRICS(Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). BRICS was first coined atGoldman Sachs (O’Neill 2001) for those nations at a similar stage of newlyadvanced economic development and the subsequent shift in global economicpower away from the older-styled developed G8 countries (Meskell 2011, 2012).

In terms of BRICS’s cohesion as a group, Mielniczuk’s (2013) analysis of theopening speeches of the BRICS leaders to the UNGA since the 1990s shows a pat-tern of discourse alignment over the years, projecting a common vision over severalissues in global foreign policy. These include the need to restructure the institutionof economic global governance, reform of the UN Security Council, and a concernagainst the perils of a unipolar world. Moreover, Ferdinand’s (2014) analysis ofvoting patterns and vote cohesion in the UNGA from 1974 to 2011 has also showna consistent pattern within the BRICS nations. He highlights a closer alignmentsince 2010, just one year after the first BRICS summit took place in Russia in2009. While Ferdinand noted that the cohesion is not complete and there has beensome divergence over two particular issues (namely, human rights and disarma-ment), even in those cases, the degree of divergence has decreased over the pastdecade. Relevant here is that BRICS countries show a high convergence in foreignpolicy within the UNGA, and that this phenomenon has increased since the cre-ation of the BRICS summits that have transformed what was a externally-imposedfinancial categorization into a political grouping (Stuenkel 2014).

One common feature of such literature is the focus on decision-making withinintergovernmental organizations where countries’ interests can more easily beassessed through voting behavior or indirect economic implications of finaldecisions. By contrast, UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention and thecharacteristics of its decision-making process make political influence more difficultto define than in the articles cited above. In particular, decisions in the WorldHeritage Committee are mainly made through consensus and multilateral negotia-tions among its members rather than with systematic voting procedures. Thisparticular feature complicates scholarly efforts to identify patterns of interestalignment and national influence.

We suggest that there is a need to develop different metrics to assess the modesthrough which countries exert their influence. More precisely, we use a quantitativeand qualitative approach to analyze patterns in decision-making processes regardinginscriptions at the World Heritage Committee sessions. On the quantitative side, wecollected information from the summary records and other World Heritage Commit-tee official documents for the period of 2003–2013. For each nomination, wetracked the Advisory Bodies’ recommendation, the content and the number of inter-ventions by States Parties during the discussions of the site’s nomination, and thefinal decision by the World Heritage Committee. We also analyzed the number ofnational delegates present at each World Heritage Committee session. Unlike otherquantitative studies which investigate patterns in the selection of properties for thewhole period of activity of the World Heritage Convention (Bertacchini andSaccone 2012, Steiner and Frey 2012, Frey et al. 2013, Reyes 2014), the data pre-sented in this article focuses on a shorter time frame of analysis (2003–2013).However, it also provides more detailed information on the procedural andsubstantive aspects of the decision-making process.

Through our quantitative analysis, we also offer more multifaceted evidence ofstates’ activity and power position within the World Heritage Committee. For each

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country, we consider the number of sites nominated, committee tenure, delegationsize, and several measures of verbal interventions. We then employ cluster analysislinking the different dimensions of country characteristics to identify homogenousgroups of States Parties in terms of power position and influence within the WorldHeritage committee. We complement the interpretation of our results through aqualitative approach, based on observations of four sessions of the UNESCO WorldHeritage Committee (2011–2014), as well as interviews with senior UNESCO offi-cials and representatives of national delegations. Along with other anthropologistsresearching UN organizations (Bendix 2013, Müller 2013) and political negotia-tions, especially within UNESCO (Brumann 2012, Schmitt 2012, Bjerregaard andNielsen 2014), we are interested in how organizations such as UNESCO have glo-bal impacts, albeit in often unexpected and unpredictable ways that are not alwaysrevealed in official agendas.

Our results suggest that in the last decade, a restricted group of emerging pow-ers including China, South Africa, Russia, and India has dominated UNESCOWorld Heritage decision-making processes, using both formal and informal influ-ence to enhance the international recognition of their heritage. At the same time,we find clear evidence for a polarization of positions between different groups ofcommittee members arising from the challenge mounted against the technicalexperts’ recommendations for site selection.

The article contributes to the cultural policy literature in two ways. It addressessoft power issues in cultural international relations by revealing how states’ behav-ior and political visions influence cultural policy outcomes at an international level.Moreover, it provides empirical data to better understand the debate concerning thegovernance of and tensions within the World Heritage system. Both contributionshave potential policy implications for the future.

The article is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the decision-makingprocess within the World Heritage Committee, Section 3 elaborates several dimen-sions of state behavior and influence specific to World Heritage system, Section 4presents the quantitative empirical strategy, Section 5 discusses the results whileSection 6 concludes by discussing emerging trends and the current debate on theresulting policy implications.

2. The World Heritage decision-making process

The World Heritage List consists of cultural and natural properties of ‘OUV’,which is defined in the Operational Guidelines of the Convention according to tencriteria detailing the specific requirements properties must meet for inclusion on theList. The composition of the World Heritage List is the outcome of two differentphases – nomination and selection – and of the interacting input of three differentactors – States Parties, Advisory Bodies, and the World Heritage Committee(Strasser 2002). The nomination process relies on the initiative of the States Parties,which submit nomination proposals for their heritage sites to be included on theList. Experts from two Advisory Bodies, the ICOMOS for cultural properties andthe IUCN for natural properties, evaluate the nomination dossiers by examiningsources proving the OUV of the heritage sites. Field missions are also mobilized toassess sites’ authenticity, integrity, and protection. Once the evaluation isconcluded, it is sent to the World Heritage Committee, which is the final decision-making body composed of 21 national delegations serving four-year terms.

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The selection of proposed heritage sites occurs at the annual sessions of theWorld Heritage Committee. According to the Operational Guidelines, the nomina-tions are presented by the Advisory Bodies, which make their recommendationsaccording to four types of evaluation: Inscription, Referral, Deferral, and NotInscription. The same evaluation system is then followed by the World HeritageCommittee in making the final decision after a discussion of the nominations. Deci-sions concerning Not Inscription imply that the State Party may not present the pro-posed heritage site again. Referral and Deferral evaluations allow States Parties toresubmit at following sessions of the Committee the heritage site, as long as theyprovide additional information or substantially revise the nomination dossier.1

States Parties can submit up to two complete nominations per year, provided that atleast one concerns a natural heritage site or a cultural landscape. The Committeecan review up to 45 nominations each year, inclusive of nominations Deferred andReferred by previous sessions, extensions, transnational nominations, and nomina-tions submitted on an emergency basis (http://whc.unesco.org/archive/opguide13-en.pdf).

Although the World Heritage Convention clearly states that decisions must betaken by a majority of two-thirds of its members present and voting (Art. 13.8), asin many other intergovernmental organizations, deliberations are characterized byconsensus and multilateral negotiations following formal discussions and informalmeetings (Reinalda and Verbeek 2004). Decisions are necessarily prepared and pre-structured, for instance, by means of drafts produced by the World Heritage Center,which acts as the Secretariat of the World Heritage Convention. During formal dis-cussion, members of the Committee may intervene more than once for each indi-vidual nomination and may even change their position in the course of thediscussion. Some nominations receive no formal discussion during the World Her-itage Committee sessions and the final decisions swiftly follow the initial AdvisoryBody recommendation. In other more contested cases, decisions are made at theplenary session following negotiations that have taken place in specifically estab-lished working groups or during smaller informal meetings between representativesfrom national delegations, Advisory Bodies, and UNESCO.

3. Uncovering the influence of States Parties in the World HeritageCommittee

In this section, we identify different dimensions of State Party behavior within thespecific context of the World Heritage Committee that are connected to the politicalinfluence and the power position a country exerts in the World Heritage decision-making process.

3.1. Nomination activity by countries

In order to assess political influence in the decision-making process within theWorld Heritage system, we analyze the patterns of nomination proposals and suc-cessful inscription by the States Parties. The key outcome of the World Heritageprocess is the inscription of heritage sites on the World Heritage List. We suggestthere is a positive correlation between the number of properties a country has onthe List and its status and prominence within the World Heritage system. Thus,having a larger number of heritage sites inscribed may provide greater political

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recognition by other States Parties on decisions affecting World Heritage. At theinternational level, countries may benefit from World Heritage by signaling thequality of their cultural and natural properties, attracting further resources frominternational cooperation in heritage protection or marketing their World Heritagesites as tourist destinations (Johnson and Barry 1995, Frey and Steiner 2011, Reyes2014).

Since inscription depends on the ability and willingness of a country to nomi-nate heritage properties in the List, this activity is particularly relevant to assessingthe interest a country has in participating in the World Heritage arena. Today, thisis crucial considering that the selection process is increasingly affected by rent-seeking and political interests (Frey et al. 2013). Although the goal of the WorldHeritage Convention is to protect sites of central importance for humanity, it isincreasingly acknowledged that inclusion of heritage sites is often taken withoutfollowing the criteria established in the Operational Guidelines for the Implementa-tion of the World Heritage Convention (Meskell et al. 2015). In such a politicizedcontext, and with the allegedly increased disconnection of World HeritageCommittee decisions from technical expertise, the main implication is that a StateParty’s nomination activity is more likely to act as a proxy for its strategic politicalinfluence and power within the multilateral system. Thus, we suggest that StatesParties are interested in increasing the number of nominated properties in order toachieve greater political influence in the World Heritage system.

3.2. Composition of the World Heritage Committee

According to the text of the World Heritage Convention, the composition of theCommittee shall ensure an equitable representation of the different regions and cul-tures of the world (Art. 8.2). This provision would help in balancing the politicalpower individual countries may exert in decisions related to World Heritage.However, despite a secret ballot procedure, political and international relations fac-tors seem to have prevailed in affecting the composition of the World HeritageCommittee. For instance, Western nations have always had a relatively dominantposition in terms of seats and length of Committee mandate. Some Western coun-tries such as France, Germany, and Italy have in the past held several consecutivemandates. Arguably, countries that are willing to see their heritage represented onthe List or want to participate actively in decisions concerning World Heritage mayachieve this goal more effectively by promoting their candidature to the Committeeas a way to exert both formal and informal influence. Bertacchini and Saccone(2012) found a positive and statistically significant correlation between membershipon the Committee, nomination activity by those same states and the likelihood ofhaving a site inscribed. This is because membership provides the political power topush sites through the nomination process, but also because countries that are partof the Committee usually anticipate membership on the governing board andprepare their applications years before (Frey et al. 2013).2

As a result, serving on the World Heritage Committee may be considered as ameasure of the influence a country is able to exert in the decision-making process.We suggest that the greater the number of years a country serves the Committeethe greater the influence it may exert in the decision-making process.

Yet considering only the composition of the World Heritage Committee bynumber of seats does not fully account for the real influence nations or regional

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groups may wield in this governing body. The size of delegations may add usefulinformation about the extent of the commitment and resources members of theCommittee are willing to invest to actively influence and participate in WorldHeritage decision-making. Significantly, comparing the composition of the WorldHeritage Committee in terms of seats and delegation size for the period 2003–2013suggests a different balance of power within this governing body. As shown inFigures 1 and 2, it emerges clearly how countries from Asia and the Pacific havegreatly outpaced Western nations in the number of delegates present, althoughEuropean and North American countries have maintained a relative majority ofseats over many years.

Figure 1. States Parties in the World Heritage Committee per regional group 2003–2013.

Figure 2. Delegates in the World Heritage Committee per regional group 2003–2013.

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Delegation size might thus be considered as a proxy for a State Party’s informalinfluence. As noted by Pouliot (2011) in the context of the UN, the size of diplo-matic missions, together with the presence of experienced diplomats, are necessaryconditions to attain status within UN diplomatic negotiations. Moreover, having alarger delegation plays a substantial role in ‘corridor diplomacy’ or in managingnegotiations of multiple items agenda for the achievement of desired outcome byStates Parties (McKeown 2009). We suggest that the larger a nation’s delegationsize, the greater its informal influence in the World Heritage decision-makingprocess.

3.3. Verbal interventions during the World Heritage Committee

Given that decisions in the World Heritage Committee are mostly taken by memberconsensus, the frequency and type of verbal interventions States Parties make dur-ing the formal discussions is relevant to infer their political influence in reachingspecific outcomes.

Being vocal in formal discussions may serve different purposes. First, consider-ing the short time the Committee spends on each nomination, verbal interventionsmay be helpful for a State Party to introduce additional information into the discus-sion or to directly influence the final decision by explicitly expressing its position.For example, during the formal sessions, Committee members may intervene in thedebate to express their evaluation of a nomination. In many instances, they ask theAdvisory Bodies to provide additional information concerning technical aspects ofthe nomination under examination. Participating in formal discussion may also beconsidered as a means to gain legitimization among peers in the Committee or toreinforce diplomatic ties among nations. The frequency of verbal interventions maybe considered as a proxy of how Committee members actively participate in thedecision-making process, and we suggest that there is positive correlation betweenthe frequency of interventions during formal discussions and the political influencea country exerts into the final decisions of the Committee.

Considering this type of intervention, another relevant dimension to address ishow States Parties of the Committee support or oppose recommendations byAdvisory Bodies. While in the past the World Heritage Committee used to followAdvisory Bodies’ recommendations (Pressouyre 1996), Committee decisions haveincreasingly diverged from the scientific opinions of the Advisory Bodies in recentyears, contributing to a drift toward a more ‘political’ rather than ‘heritage’approach to the Convention (Jokilehto 2011, Meskell et al. 2015). The main con-tention concerns nominations that the Advisory Bodies recommend for Not Inscrip-tion, Deferral, and Referral. Such evaluations make a State Party’s effort to inscribea property more difficult and require additional time and resources to have theproperty inscribed in the List. Many countries describe any decision that is not toinscribe as a ‘poisoned gift’ – a term that delegates have used repeatedly with somedisdain throughout recent Committee meetings (Meskell 2012, Hølleland 2013).

To illustrate, Figures 3 and 4 provide a graphic visualization of how verbalinterventions expressed by Committee members during the formal discussion havebeen framed for this category of nominations in the period of 2003–2013. Con-sidering verbal interventions as ties between Committee members and nominatingcountries, Figure 3 shows which members of the World Heritage Committee (darkgray squared nodes) have supported upgrading the evaluation of other nations’

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Figure 3. States Parties’ verbal interventions supporting upgrade for propertiesrecommended as Not Inscribed, Deferred and Referred – 2003–2013 (nodes with 15 or moreties displayed).

Figure 4. States Parties’ verbal interventions opposing upgrade for propertiesrecommended as Not Inscribed, Deferred and Referred – 2003–2013 (nodes with 5 or moreties displayed).

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nominations (light gray rounded nodes) that were initially recommended for NotInscription, Deferral, and Referral.3

Similarly, Figure 4 displays the network of Committee members’ verbal inter-ventions that have opposed an upgrade of the Advisory Body recommendation.4

The size of the nodes is proportional to the number of ties a Committee memberhas developed or a nominating country has received.

The two figures reveal a clear divergence in the use of verbal interventions byCommittee members regarding Advisory Bodies’ initial technical evaluations. Onthe one end, the most vocal countries challenging Advisory Body recommendationshave been emerging non-Western states.5 On the other end, Western nations havebeen more vocal in maintaining and supporting the technical decisions made by theAdvisory Bodies. Such arguments suggest that questioning the technical evaluationsmay represent a means for emerging nations to raise their political influence in theselection of sites.

4. Empirical strategy

We use cluster analysis to identify common patterns of behavior and characteristicsof countries that have served on the Committee. Considering the multifaceteddimension of political influence within the World Heritage decision-making process,this methodology is useful in drawing distinct groups of countries that can be cat-egorized according to one or more common patterns within the World HeritageCommittee. An interpretation of the results allows a better understanding of thestrategies of individual States Parties.

Cluster analysis refers to a general set of statistical techniques used to formhomogenous groups of objects that are described by a variety of characteristics(Everitt et al. 2001). The optimal number of clusters is assessed throughagglomerative methods that signal the most marked differences among potentialclusters. As an agglomerative method, Ward’s minimum-variance method is used(see Appendix 1). According to the literature (Everitt et al. 2001), this method issuperior to alternative algorithms and to provide more homogeneous clusters.

The data we collected and organized come from the summary records alongwith other World Heritage Committee official documents for the period 2003–2013.The summary record contains the text of verbal interventions that occurred in for-mal discussions at Committee sessions. For each nomination of cultural and naturalproperties,6 we tracked the Advisory Bodies’ recommendation, the final decisiontaken by the World Heritage Committee, the number of delegates, and each verbalintervention by States Parties during the sessions. This provided to a unique dataset of 340 nominations for the period under examination.

The country variables we chose are the following:

• Number of years a country served the World Heritage Committee.• Number of sites proposed by the country for inscription at Committeesessions.

• Country average number of delegates per Committee session.• Country average number of interventions during formal Committee sessions.• Percentage of a country’s interventions supporting the upgrade in the finalevaluation for nominations initially recommended by Advisory Bodies forNot Inscription, Deferral, or Referral over total country’s interventions.

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• Percentage of a country’s interventions opposing the upgrade in the finalevaluation for nominations initially recommended by Advisory Bodies forNot Inscription, Deferral, or Referral over total country’s interventions.

Our analysis concerns only those countries that have held a Committee seat forat least three years in the period between 2003 and 2013. This decision was takenso as to rule out potential noise in the results from nations that were ending theirmandate in the Committee at the beginning of the period or starting at the very endof it. In this way, we restrict our sample to States Parties that have servedsufficiently on the Committee to be effectively involved in the World Heritagedecision-making process.

5. Results

Using Ward’s minimum-variance method, we can identify four clusters of StatesParties serving on the Committee for the period 2003–2013 according to theselected variables. Table 1 reports the descriptive statistics highlighting the maindifferences of means across clusters, which can be used to provide additionalinsights into an interpretative framework of the main dynamics occurring withinWorld Heritage decision-making.

From Table 1, we can see that Cluster 3, which includes Egypt, India, China,Russia, South Africa, Thailand, and Japan, emerges distinctively for its maincharacteristics.7 This group leads in several aspects of formal and informal influ-ence that have been identified. This includes the number of years of tenure in theWorld Heritage Committee (6, 6), the number of nominations to the World HeritageList presented during Committee sessions (7, 1), and the number of delegatesparticipating at the sessions (18, 4). In terms of vocal interventions during formaldiscussions, countries in this group have not been, on average, the most active.However, they do show a relatively high proportion of interventions for upgrade inthe final decisions for those sites initially recommended by Advisory Bodies forNot Inscription, Deferral, or Referral.

Looking at the composition of this cluster, two main features can be noted.First, it is characterized by the strong presence of Asian nations, which suggests anincreasing political influence of this regional group in Committee decision-making.Second, and more significantly, in this cluster, we find Russia, India, China, andSouth Africa, which are part of the BRICS group. Over the past several years atleast three of the four have simultaneously served on the World HeritageCommittee. They seated together in the governing body from 2003 to 2005, whileChina, India, and South Africa served on the 2010 and 2011 World HeritageCommittee and Russia, India, and South Africa in 2012 and 2013. Our resultssuggest that their alliance, evidenced by the 2011 Sanya Declaration8 (Mielniczuk2013, Ferdinand 2014), has enabled their inscription of new sites on the WorldHeritage List and ensured that potentially endangered sites also remain on that Listregardless of the infrastructural development or resource extraction that threatenstheir conservation.

The countries in this cluster have extended both formal and informal influencein the World Heritage decision-making process mainly with the objective of usingit to enable the inscription of more properties on the List and to gain internationallegitimization. Several facts from recent Committee sessions illustrate this trend.

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Table

1.Clustersof

StatesPartiesin

theWorld

Heritage

Com

mittee

(2003–2013).

Cluster

variables

Countries

pergroup

Years

inthe

committee

Num

berof

nominations

Avgerage

number

ofdelegates

Interventio

nsperyear

%Supporting

upgrade

%Opposing

upgrade

Cluster

1(n

=27)

Mean

3.93

2.85

7.15

10.18

18.96

7.20

Argentin

a,Australia,Bahrain,Benin,

Cam

bodia,

Canada,

Chile,Cuba,

Ethiopia,

France,

Israel,Lith

uania,

Kuw

ait,

Madagascar,Mauritiu

s,Mexico,

New

Zealand,Norway,Oman,Peru,

Portugal,

Saint

Lucia,South

Korea,Spain,Sweden,

US

SD0.47

2.85

4.10

4.25

5.41

6.68

Cluster

2(n

=11)

Mean

41.82

6.31

15.51

34.89

6.27

Brazil,Colom

bia,

Iraq,Jordan,Kenya,

Lebanon,Mali,Morocco,Netherlands,

Tunisia,UAE

SD0.44

1.6

4.00

5.24

5.06

7.41

Cluster

3(n

=8)

Mean

6.63

7.13

18.48

12.35

24.25

3.22

China,Egypt,India,

Japan,

Nigeria,Russia,

South

Africa,

Thailand

SD0.74

6.12

10.87

5.67

9.14

1.27

Cluster

4(n

=3)

Mean

3.67

47.67

19.75

16.81

38.21

Estonia,Switzerland,UK

SD0.57

31.37

6.42

5.54

4.05

Note:

Italicsreferto

thestandard

deviation.

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First, Russia, India, China, and Japan have all opposed recent efforts to prohibitnomination of sites by States Parties currently serving on the Committee. Thus, ahigh rate of nominations coupled with their intent to serve on the Committee is toensure their own national properties are listed. Second, a Norwegian report to the34th session of the Committee9 found that over the previous 10–15 years, anincreasing politicization has developed whereby politics has trumped technicalexpertise. The report claimed (2010, 3), for example, that China had put pressureon other members to secure their own nominated sites for inscription before formalCommittee discussions, with several States Parties expressing concern.

The Russian nomination of the Bolgar Historical and Archaeological Complex(http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/981) provides a revealing example of how the multi-faceted channels of political pressure that can be used to have sites inscribed on theWorld Heritage List (Plets 2015). During the 2012 sessions in St Petersburg,ICOMOS recommended that Bolgar not be inscribed on the List because of signifi-cant changes to the historic structures following massive consolidation and recon-struction efforts. During those same World Heritage meetings, Russia offered to flydelegates to the nearby city of Kazan where it hosted UNESCO’s Youth Day,attempting to secure multilateral support for Bolgar’s nomination (Meskell et al.2015). During the 2013 meetings in Cambodia, a French documentary film(Bentura 2014) revealed the excessive lobbying and pressure exerted on otherCommittee members by the Russian ambassador. In the 2014 meetings held inQatar, Russia strategically reframed the criterion for inscription of Bolgar as aMuslim pilgrimage site to ensure the support of many Islamic nations on the WorldHeritage Committee. Iraq, Qatar, Algeria, Malaysia, and the UAE backed Russia,and the site was inscribed.

From the qualitative evidence collected at Committee sessions, it is also possi-ble to highlight some forms of the exchange of political support between countrieswithin Cluster 3 to ensure that their economic interests might be concealed withrecognition of heritage protection. The case of Mapungubwe Cultural Landscapeand South Africa’s maneuvering to make certain it was not placed on the List ofWorld Heritage in Danger10 illustrate this point. With an open cast colliery operat-ing within Mapungubwe’s proposed buffer zone, the IUCN, ICOMOS, and theWorld Heritage Center voiced their concerns to South Africa, sent scoping mis-sions, and produced reports outlining the destructive impacts of the mine (Meskell2013). India and Russia both strongly supported South Africa in the 2012 Commit-tee meetings held in Saint Petersburg. Russia was also facing controversy over itsown property, the Virgin Komi Forests, then endangered due to state-sponsoredgold mining (see 35 COM 7B.25). With the BRICS alliance in force, the debt wasrepaid when Komi was discussed. This example clearly aligns with Pavone’s(2008) insights confirming that members of the World Heritage Committee are, firstand foremost, state representatives who are free to pursue their own national inter-ests, maximize power, push their economic self-interest, and minimize their transac-tion costs. In the examples provided, national imperatives and economic necessitiesseem to be more binding than any ethical norms related to the international andintergovernmental responsibility over the protection of World Heritage as defined inthe World Heritage Convention.

While Cluster 3 provides clear evidence of nations that have extended theirinfluence across the UNESCO World Heritage Committee during the period2003–2013, the analysis of both Cluster 2 and 4 points to another remarkable

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pattern in the World Heritage decision-making process. Countries in both Cluster 2and 4 on average do not rate highly in terms of their influence in terms of Commit-tee tenure, size of delegations, or number of nominations during the period ofanalysis. Yet these two groups have been the most vocal in formal discussions, withan average of 15.5 and 19.7 statements per session, respectively. Interestingly,though, their verbal interventions reveal dramatically divergent attitudes.

Cluster 2 is characterized by nations that have more frequently challenged thetechnical recommendations initially slated for Not Inscription, Deferral, andReferral by the Advisory Bodies. On average, the countries in this cluster show ashare of about 35% of this type of statement over their total interventions in formaldiscussion. Notably, with the exception of one European country, Cluster 2 includesseveral emerging and developing nations, most of them belonging to the ArabStates regional group. This finding is in line with the analysis by Schmitt (2012),who highlights that during the 30th and 31st Committee sessions, countries such asMorocco and Tunisia advanced a strategy aimed at pursuing a lower degree of con-cordance with the requirements for inscription on the World Heritage List. A simi-lar strategy characterized the behavior of those countries in relation to compliancewith the norms of protection for inscribed sites, as detailed in his example of thesite of Tipasa (Algeria) on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Schmitt arguesthat this situation results both from the presence of extraneous political influences(such as efforts to raise national prestige or please powerful states) and a system of‘checks and balances’ affecting the decisions of Committee members. Our analysesexpand the time frame of Schmitt’s observations (2006–2007) to the period from2003 to 2013 and demonstrate that those countries’ behavior has remainedconsistent over the entire decade.

At the opposite end, Cluster 4, which comprises Switzerland, Estonia, and theUnited Kingdom, shows quite different dynamics from Cluster 2. These nationshave been very vocal in their number of interventions, especially to support theevaluations of the Advisory Bodies and to oppose proposals by others Committeemembers to upgrade recommendations slated for Not Inscription, Deferral, orReferral. The so-called ‘neutral’ nations such as Estonia and Switzerland continueto argue for scientific and expert-based decision-making. At the end of its tenureon the Committee in 2013, Estonia expressed its gratitude to the Advisory Bodiesbut reiterated its concern over the political pressures being exercised by nationalgovernments and the dwindling heritage expertise within the delegations. Moreover,Switzerland and Estonia have advocated that Committee members abstain fromnominating sites during membership.

Finally, Cluster 1 represents a heterogeneous group of countries that do notexhibit a high position in the dimensions of political influence identified in theWorld Heritage context relative to the other clusters. What is relevant to highlightin this case is that this group comprise almost all the Western countries that haveserved on the Committee in the last decade. Crucially, some of them have been alsosome of the most influential States Parties in the history of the World HeritageConvention for both the number of properties inscribed in the List and their activerole in the World Heritage Committee.

For example, France and Spain are among the Western countries with thehighest tallies of properties on the World Heritage List. France, Australia, and theUnited States have been among the earliest signatories to the World Heritage Con-vention in 1975, 1974, and 1973, respectively. They are also among the nations

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that have served longest on the World Heritage Committee (France for 25 years;Australia for 23 years, and the United States for 23 years). It has been acknowl-edged that the final form of the World Heritage Convention owes much to an ear-lier US proposal of a World Heritage Trust (Cameron and Rössler 2013, Stott2011, 2012), whereas countries such as France and Australia have been active inenvisioning strategies to solve the imbalances in the World Heritage list such as theGlobal Strategy11 (Gfeller 2013, Labadi 2005). Yet these nations have also beenless willing to adopt the provisions of the Global Strategy (UNESCO 2011) interms of slowing down or halting the pace of their own proposed nominations. Infact, during the period analyzed (2003–2013) those countries may have reducedtheir vocal influence within the Committee sessions, yet their nomination activityhas remained quite stable over the years.

6. Concluding remarks

This article has analyzed whether emerging countries are exerting their influenceacross the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and how this in turn affects WorldHeritage decision-making.

Although an extensive literature has addressed, both quantitatively and qualita-tively, how the political influence and position of states affects decision-makingprocess within international organizations, little evidence has been produced regard-ing the political and economic factors that influence decisions in UNESCO WorldHeritage. We argue that in the World Heritage arena, political influence in decision-making can be studied by focusing on several context-specific dimensions of StateParty behavior. More specifically, we consider the number of heritage sitesnominated, committee tenure, size of delegations, and several measures of verbalinterventions.

Employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, we identify and interpretcommon patterns of behavior arising from different groups of countries for the periodof 2003–2013. While our analysis is still based on a rather limited empirical basis,the results show two distinct patterns of politicization and polarization in which thebalance of power in the World Heritage Committee is shifting toward emergingnations and is affecting specifically the decision-making process for new inscriptionson the World Heritage List. First, a restricted group of emerging nations, comprisingthe majority of the BRICS countries with China, South Africa, Russia, and India, hasdominated the UNESCO World Heritage decision-making process using both formaland informal influence to enhance their soft power through the international recogni-tion of their national heritage. Second, we find evidence of a polarization of positionsbetween different groups of Committee members arising from the challenge to techni-cal expertise involving site selection. Such polarization of attitudes arises betweenclear clusters of delegations, in particular the contrasting positions of Cluster 2 (madeup primarily of emerging countries) and Cluster 4 (comprising the most vocal westerncountries), and highlights the phenomenon of mounting attacks on the institutionalstatus quo and a situation of increasing tension taking place in the multilateral arenaof UNESCO World Heritage.

We suggest that both the trends in the politicization and polarization of attitudes,underscored by our quantitative data, are due to the growing dissatisfaction with theinstitutional status quo and reveal a situation in which conflicts arising within themultilateral institution (UNESCO) may eventually shift toward a form of contested

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multilateralism12 within the World Heritage system. While this is not currentlyhappening, several factors point toward the need for urgent reform within the processof evaluation and decision-making for inscriptions on the World Heritage List.

In 2010, The Economist (2010) reported on the 34th session of the WorldHeritage Committee held in Brasilia and signaled that ‘the UN agency (was) bendingits own rules under pressure from member states’. In fact, during that meeting, half ofthe Committee was composed of new members and some of our informants attributedthe changed dynamics that we observed quantitatively to this new geopolitical config-uration. In 2011, during the 35th Committee session, the mounting challenges to theAdvisory Bodies’ recommendations by a selected group of countries (including thosepresent in our Clusters 3 and 4) gave rise to murmurings of the imminent ‘death ofthe Convention’ (Meskell 2011), thus implying that the rising conflictual situationwould damage both the viability and the prestige of the World Heritage List. In 2012,the increasing dissatisfaction of some States Parties over the Advisory Bodies’ recom-mendation lead some national delegates to suggest that if the situation continued,alternative advisory organizations may be considered in lieu of the ones that are cur-rently used. While none of those situations has yet materialized, there are definitesigns of a high level of disagreement within the Word Heritage Committee.

Critique and reflection over the necessity of reform to World Heritage decision-making processes have come also from within UNESCO itself. An exemplary caseis an article written by Kishore Rao (2010), then Deputy Director (currentlyDirector) of the World Heritage Center. Rao boldly stated that the issues related tothe Committee’ criticism of the Advisory Bodies highlighted systemic problems inthe process of decision-making within the World Heritage System. Specifically, thecurrent adjudicatory process is trumped by the economic interests that surround thenomination process, where states such as China invest millions of dollars in nom-ination dossiers and on that basis expect that such outlays will be materialized intoWorld Heritage inscriptions. Rao suggested that a system of increased cooperationand mentoring of nomination proposals would be better suited than the actualsituation where Advisory Bodies have mainly an evaluative role of nominations.This change would ultimately favor a more collaborative process between the StatesParties and the Advisory Bodies.

More recently, members of the World Heritage Committee have recognized theneed for internal reflection to address their increasing divergence of opinion withAdvisory Bodies. In 2014, the 38th Session of the World Heritage Committee saw thelevel of discordance between the Advisory Body recommendations and the Committeefinal decision reach a new peak. Some 47% of the Advisory Bodies recommendationswere overturned by the Committee and a record of 81% of nominated sites wasinscribed on the List. Given this situation, the Committee decided (Decision 38 Com13, 9) to create an informal working group at the invitation of the German delegationto discuss issues related to the working methods and evaluation processes of nomina-tion. While the results of this working group are not yet known, our quantitative andqualitative data suggest that the conflict in question is the result of a shift of influencein the decision-making process led by a restricted group of countries including China,South Africa, Russia, and India. The new convergence of interests headed by this groupof emerging states is embedded in a wider crisis within the multilateral order thataccording to some scholars is stalling the work of several UN organizations (Hale et al.2013), the effects of which have begun to be felt at the level of the UNESCO WorldHeritage Committee (Claudi 2011, Meskell 2011, 2012, Meskell et al. 2015).

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Ultimately, our integrated data analysis, employing both quantitative andqualitative data, extends discussions on the role of BRICS within the UNESCOWorld Heritage Committee and supports claims that emerging nations are currentlygaining political power in existing UN structures of multilateral governance.

AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank our colleagues at the World Heritage Center, ICOMOS, ICCROMand the IUCN as well as many national delegations who have taken time to meet us. Wealso would like to thank Nick Brown and Kyle Lee-Crossett for their meticulous work indata coding. We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpfulsuggestions. Finally, the authors wish to thank Nick Brown for his editorial assistance.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes1. Site referral occurs when some minor additional information is needed from a State

Party to supplement the original nomination. This can be provided in a short period oftime and does not need to be assessed by sending a new expert mission to the property.Deferral entails additional information from, or actions needed by, the State Party thatis major. This would lead to a substantial revision of the nomination and thus a new orsubstantially revised nomination dossier and would need to be assessed by sending anew mission to the property.

2. Recently, there have been concerted efforts to prohibit nomination of sites by StatesParties currently serving on the Committee, but the Committee itself has vetoed thisrecommendation. The matter is raised each year with nations such as Finland,Switzerland, and Estonia advocating abstention during membership, whereas Turkey,Russia, India, China, and Japan, to name a few, take the opposite position.

3. As States Parties in the World Heritage Committee may propose nominations, the samecountry may appear in the figures both as a dark gray squared node (Committeemember) or a light gray rounded node (nominating country). However, according toOperational Guidelines, a Committee member is not entitled to intervene in the formaldiscussion when one of its nominations is under examination.

4. A verbal intervention supporting the upgrade of the Advisory Body initialrecommendations means that the Committee members pushes the final decision towarda better final evaluation, so from Referral to Inscription, from Deferral to Referral oreven Inscription, and so on. Conversely, for verbal interventions opposing the upgrade,we consider cases in which a committee member has both expressed the sameAdvisory Body recommendation or it has provided a lower evaluation during theformal discussion.

5. As each nomination dossier is a separate case, it is not possible to analyze quantita-tively the main arguments used by Committee members to express disagreement withthe Advisory Bodies recommendations. Nevertheless, from qualitative evidence col-lected during the past four Committee sessions, it is possible to single out somepatterns: (i) difference of opinion in relation to the presence (or absence) of OUV, (ii)evaluative criteria being narrowly judged from a Western perspective, (iii) claims ofthe presence of factual errors in the Advisory Body recommendations that negativelyinfluenced its final decision, (iv) minor flaws in the nomination dossier that should notslow down the inscription process.

6. We excluded from the analysis nominations of mixed properties owing to divergencesbetween Advisory Bodies recommendations or in the final decision of the Committeeregarding either the natural or cultural component of the nomination. Nominations of

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mixed properties account for about 4% of all the nominations submitted to the WorldHeritage Committee in the period 2003–2013.

7. The hierarchical tree diagram of the cluster analysis performed (See Appendix 1) alsoconfirms that this cluster is the most distant from the other formed ones.

8. The Sanya declaration released during the 3rd BRICS summit reiterated the strongcommitment of BRICS countries to UN multilateral diplomacy. It also stated theiragreement over the need of a comprehensive reform in particular of the UN SecurityCouncil. It also expressed the support of China and Russia to the aspiration of India,Brazil, and South Africa to play a bigger role in the UN (see: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/14/c_13829453_2.htm).

9. The Report was prepared by the Norwegian Delegation and used as unofficial docu-ment at the 34th session of the World Heritage Committee, with the title ‘Rapport fraUnescos verdensarvkomités 34.sesjon, Brasilia 25.juli – 3.august 2010’.

10. Inclusion of sites on the List of World Heritage in Danger, which is decided yearly bymembers of the World Heritage Committee, includes properties with World Heritagestatus that have been threatened by serious and specific dangers, such as: the threat ofdisappearance caused by accelerated deterioration, large-scale public or private pro-jects, or rapid urban or tourist development projects, the threat of an armed conflict,calamities, and cataclysms.

11. The Global Strategy is an initiative launched in 1994 by the World Heritage Commit-tee to remedy the lack of balance in the type of inscribed properties and geographicalareas represented. Its aim was to ensure that the World Heritage List would reflect thediversity of world’s cultural and natural diversity fulfilling the requirement of OUV(http://whc.unesco.org/en/globalstrategy/).

12. Contested multilateralism, as defined by Morse and Keohane (2014), refers to thesituation of a high level of conflictuality in multilateral institutions. This situationoccurs when competing coalitions of nation states dissatisfied with the status quo cou-ple the threat of defection with that of the creation of alternative multilateral organiza-tions (regime shifting or competitive regime creation).

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Appendix 1. Cluster analysis methodologyWard’s minimum-variance method used to perform cluster analysis belongs to the group ofhierarchical agglomerative methods in which every object is an individual cluster at thebeginning of the algorithm. The clusters are then successively joined together into groupsuntil only a single cluster remains. The objective of Ward’s method is to join two clusters ateach step such that the variance for the joined clusters is minimized. However, since clusters

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that are merged using Ward’s method cannot be separated again in subsequent steps, it hasbeen suggested that the results of the Ward technique should be corrected in an additionalstep. In this case, the results are checked for robustness by the use of discriminant analysis.

In order to determine the optimal number of clusters, the criterion of agglomerationschedule is employed. The agglomeration schedule, as shown in Table A1, reveals increasesin the distances at each step of the fusion process.

High increases in the distance levels suggest an optimal number of clusters, since theysignal the most marked differences among potential clusters. Gaps in the distance levels canbe found from clusters 6 to 5, 4 to 3, and 2 to 1. Therefore, several cluster solutions can beat stake. The choice of the four-clusters solution is chosen because, except for a two clusteralternative, it provides the second best solution in terms of highest share (91.8%) of objectsclassified correctly according to discriminant analysis, and it is better suited to highlight themain differences in country behavior occurring within the context of the phenomenon understudy.

Table A1. Agglomeration schedule (ward technique, last 25 steps).

Number of clusters Clusters combined Distance Increase of distance

25 20 39 0.842 0.07524 44 48 0.935 0.09323 1 2 1.033 0.09822 11 25 1.152 0.11921 7 23 1.275 0.12320 16 30 1.400 0.12519 34 41 1.527 0.12718 6 18 1.664 0.13717 7 8 1.821 0.15716 3 12 2.038 0.21715 11 22 2.256 0.21814 13 17 2.494 0.23813 14 44 2.733 0.23912 20 34 2.978 0.24511 1 36 3.253 0.27510 20 45 3.665 0.4129 3 7 4.094 0.4298 10 20 4.694 0.6007 1 16 5.312 0.6186 6 11 6.069 0.7575 1 3 7.019 0.9504 10 13 8.045 1.0263 1 14 9.992 1.9472 1 6 12.008 2.0161 1 10 16.427 4.419

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