Heritage status quo

Residents of the Slovak village of Vlkolínec and the indigenous Maasai communities in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area are among those challenging the consequences of the esteemed status. Among their grievances include too many tourists, restrictions on how land and homes can be used, and growing concerns that the needs of residents are being sacrificed to preserve a landscape for visitors.

Vlkolínec, an intact settlement of traditional wooden houses in central Slovakia, was inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List in 1993. Its typical architecture helped make it a global heritage site. But residents now argue that the village has been transformed from a living community into something resembling an open-air museum as over 100,000 yearly visitors crowd the tiny village of fewer than 20 permanent residents.

Tourism has brought crowds into a settlement where people still live. Residents have complained about visitors looking into homes and about the difficulty of carrying out renovations because of strict conservation requirements. What was once a traditional village, critics say, increasingly risks becoming a tourist attraction designed around preserving buildings rather than sustaining the people who live in them.

In Tanzania, the conflict is even more closely tied to indigenous rights. Maasai pastoralists and organisations including the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance have called for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to be removed from the World Heritage List. They argue that conservation policies and tourism development have undermined their land rights and traditional livelihoods, and that the residents are displaced from ancestral grazing lands.

Meanwhile, Unesco has maintained that it has never called for the displacement of the Maasai, yet the communities including the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Tarangire argue on traditional Maasai lands.

The English Lake District offers another version of the same debate. Awarded World Heritage Site status in 2017, the mountainous region and national park in Cumbria, Northwest England has since faced criticism from conservationists who argue that the designation can reinforce damaging patterns of tourism and land management. Campaigners have also questioned whether intensive sheep farming should continue to dominate the landscape, arguing that it can inhibit tree regeneration, biodiversity and rewilding.

But the irony is hard to miss: a status created to protect exceptional places can sometimes make it harder to change them. Unesco delisting is rare, but it is not unprecedented. Oman’s Arabian Oryx Sanctuary became the first site to lose its World Heritage Site status in 2007 after the government reduced the protected area and proceeded with oil and gas exploration. Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley was delisted in 2009 after the construction of a bridge across the Elbe was deemed incompatible with the site’s outstanding universal value.

Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City in England followed in 2021. Unesco removed it after large-scale redevelopment, including plans for a new football stadium and other construction, was judged to have damaged the historic character for which the site was recognised.

These cases show that delisting has traditionally been associated with development projects, government decisions or failures to protect heritage. The newer disputes in Vlkolínec, Ngorongoro and the English Lake District point to a more complicated question: what happens when the people living inside a World Heritage Site believe that protection itself has become intrusive? Unesco status is intended to protect places considered to have “outstanding universal value”. But heritage is not simply made of buildings, landscapes and monuments. It also consists of communities, livelihoods and living traditions.

The growing backlash therefore raises an uncomfortable question for the global heritage movement: How much should a community have to sacrifice to preserve something the world has decided belongs to everyone?