Figure 16.1 Tour boats in Ha Long Bay (Photo R.Bushell)
16
World Heritage, Communities and Tourism
Fraught Relationships
Many consider the relationship between World Heritage sites and tourism fraught. Tourtellot (2007) in World Heritage wrote that tourism is the ‘biggest threat and benefactor’ of World Heritage sites. The ‘threat’ is not confined to the heritage resource itself, but extends to those communities organically connected to World Heritage sites, with the desire for economic wellbeing jostling amongst a host of other values (Staiff 2010). Tourism research literature has long been attempting to understand the impacts of tourism on physical, cultural, social and economic environments of destination communities. Staiff and Ongkhluap (forthcoming) evocatively recall the work of Robert Wood (1993) noting, ‘[he] wrote memorably of the governing metaphor dominating the research scenario: as though tourism and a destination community were billiard balls, each a discrete entity – tourism, the white ball hurtling towards a stationary coloured ball’, the destination then ‘suffering’ the impacts of this external force. The reality is somewhat different and far more complex. Destinations and local communities are not merely passive in the process. ‘Tourism’, ‘community’ and ‘heritage’ are not neat entities. Each is impossible to define, let alone assuming any consensus about defining characteristics, perspectives, behaviours or agency. Rather, each term is a reductive abstraction of what is very messy, porous, relational, contested and in motion (see, for example, Smith 2006; Winter 2007; Waterton and Watson 2010a, 2010b).
Anticipated and cited benefits of tourism in heritage places include the creation of local employment and enhanced conservation, the perceived negatives include hastened socio-cultural changes and degradation of the heritage resources. As Tourtellot suggests, desirable and undesirable outcomes can be attributed to increased visitor numbers and are amplified by World Heritage status (Teo et al. 2001; Dearborn and Stallmeyer 2010). This chapter re-examines these tensions blurring the ‘global’ and ‘local’ and acknowledging the inconvenient messiness of numerous converging forces with conflicting values percolating through the heritage ‘system’ and ‘community’, along with ongoing restructuring of spatial governances. It also gestures towards our ambivalence about conservation and development being ‘balanced’, looking instead to unsettle this oft-used binary and attempting to move beyond the associated expectations this precarious language creates, instead seeing conservation and development as entangled processes within living places with (plural) heritages.
The past few decades have seen several significant changes important to understanding these dynamics. ‘Tourism’ has transformed in many ways: numbers travelling have increased exponentially; places visited, purposes, length of stay and types of visitors are ever expanding. These have brought and been part of numerous (global) changes producing challenges and opportunities at heritage destinations. Part of this growth has been the massive mobilisation of leisure travel within the Asian region. The ‘success’ of the World Heritage Convention has also seen a parallel increase in the numbers of sites inscribed as World Heritage. The global restructuring of economies toward post-industrial tertiary sectors are dependent on a number of foreign and local, public and private actors. This has had a profound effect on both heritage and tourism policy and practices. At the same time, a new heritage discourse has emerged, refocusing attention from monuments and objects to places and people; one that encapsulates sense of place, community perceptions and attachments, indigenous peoples, cultural landscapes, non-linear histories, memory and the intangible (Smith 2006; Winter 2007; Smith and Akagowa 2009; Smith and Waterton 2009; Waterton and Watson, 2010a, 2010b). So, too, the language and conceptualisations of heritage have been seeping into the lexicon of ‘community’ and ‘community development’ and within local people’s conversations where ‘heritage’ is engaging and empowering without precision of meaning or usage. This process is impossible to manage and creates a level of agency, expectation and opportunity that enables community awareness and attachment to heritage, something desired in the rhetoric of numerous heritage conventions and charters, even if the outcomes are not those necessarily envisaged. Has the heritage system (and its various instruments and associated body of knowledge) shifted with the discourse and the processes of heritage democratisation? Has the system been able to envision the realities and complexities of how everyday lives and heritage places might co-exist and how best to manage the ensuing tensions? Or rather does the system attempt to filter out the complexity (Dear and Flusty 2002)? We would suggest that in using reified abstractions, the heritage system creates unrealistic expectations on many spatial levels: international, national, regional and local.
We will explore these problematic relationships and tensions using two case studies. Ha Long Bay, a natural World Heritage site in Vietnam which exemplifies issues about the capacity for a site and its local people to absorb ever-increasing numbers of visitors. And, Luang Prabang, Laos, a cultural World Heritage town that illustrates the challenges of finding workable compromises that speak to both conservation processes and community development needs.
Safeguarding the Past/Future
The World Heritage Convention came into being through the recognition of the loss from the devastation of two World Wars. The process of wealthier nations assisting poorer nations to protect their heritage originated with the League of Nations and was taken over by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) after World War II. Its importance was heightened by international concern around the decision to build the Aswan High Dam in Egypt and to flood the Nile valley containing the Abu Simbel temples – ‘treasures’ of ancient Egyptian civilisation. UNESCO launched an international safeguarding campaign to relocate the temples and formulated recommendations for the Safeguarding of the Beauty and Character of Landscapes and Sites (UNESCO 1962). Following years of discussion and debate, in 1965 the US Government recommended the establishment of a Trust for World Heritage. With UNESCO’s support the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) took on the challenge of this recommendation. The resultant Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the World Heritage Convention) was adopted by the 17th session of the General Conference of UNESCO in Paris, 16th November 1972, coming into force in 1977 once ratified by twenty nations (UNESCO 2005).
The Convention was enthusiastically adopted with the first twelve sites inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1978 (UNESCO 2008). But, to the Advisory Bodies and others, the somewhat ad hoc processes lacked coherent policy, the resultant lack of representativeness of the list was and is still considered problematic and the sole criterion of Outstanding Universal Value impossible to define (Cleere 2006). Progressive changes have been implemented as the concept itself has evolved, with the addition of selection criteria – six for cultural and four for natural sites, integrated in 2004 into one list of ten criteria covering natural, cultural, mixed sites and cultural landscapes – and the revision of Operational Guidelines.1 UNESCO’s stated World Heritage mission includes establishing management plans and reporting systems, helping States Parties safeguard World Heritage properties, supporting public awareness-building for World Heritage conservation, encouraging the participation of local populations and encouraging international cooperation in the conservation of the world’s cultural and natural heritage (UNESCO 2008).
The World Heritage Convention together with many other international agreements – such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP 1993) and the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (The Venice Charter; ICOMOS 1964) – have been a response to the recognition that the forces of conflict, modernity and urbanisation are destroying and consuming much that is precious and irreplaceable:our heritages. The protection of biological diversity is crucial to sustain life on Earth. The international environmental movement regards ecosystem conservation to be at a crisis point and central to the challenges of climate change (IUCN 2010). Likewise, the protection of cultural heritage and spirit of place through the safeguarding of both tangible (sites, buildings, landscapes, routes, objects) and intangible elements (memories, narratives, written documents, festivals, commemorations, rituals, traditional knowledge, values, textures, colours, odours, etc.) protects ‘an irreplaceable source of spiritual and intellectual richness for all humankind’ (ICOMOS 1994). Some 187 State Parties have now ratified the Convention and currently 9362 properties are on the list, although more than 50 per cent are located in Europe and North America and various other imbalances still exist with 725 cultural, 183 natural and 28 mixed sites (UNESCO 2010a). The separation of natural and cultural environments/heritages creates a legacy that is part of the tensions and denials of complexity, where systems label and separate things that are in reality far more blurred than they are separate.
World Heritage: Celebrated Conservation or Contested Concept?
World Heritage is a classification system designed to protect and celebrate what are regarded as the most significant places of ‘outstanding universal value’3 worldwide. Can a system designated to preserve and celebrate the past/present also respond to contemporary needs and demands for change by those living in heritages places? Can such a system, authorised to protect global values, also respect and nurture local values? Projected growth of international travel raises questions about how development pressures at the most emblematic and visited heritage tourism sites can be managed. Of particular interest here is the exponential growth in intra-regional travel within South East Asia and the attendant demand for heritage tourism, together with the perception of inherent tensions between conservation, community and economic development objectives. This tension discourse and the observable tensions (political, economic, ecological and cultural) are an expression of the contested realities of both ‘heritage’ and ‘development’ (seen as ontologically distinct) and of the many competing desires and expectations that are in constant process as part of everyday life in places designated as World Heritage (Bushell 2010).
While there is, on many levels and within many spheres of interest, a global consensus for safeguarding heritage places (and many associated international bodies, guidelines, policies, laws and instruments), ‘heritage’ is simultaneously contested, continually reconstructed and negotiated, subject to interpretation and reinterpretation and to shifts in collective world views (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004). The very separation of natural and cultural worlds is a construct that is problematic. Yet, as mentioned, the World Heritage Convention delineates the two very clearly in its articles, and is governed by two separate advisory bodies4 – IUCN for nature and ICOMOS for culture – with very discrete areas of responsibility and normative instruments that perpetuate the distinction. Despite instituting the cultural landscapes approach and mixed site designation in 2004, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) among others asserts ‘natural’ heritage is an inappropriate label. By virtue of human interaction and interpretation, all natural landscapes are culturally inscribed, understood and valued. The separation is based on powerful western constructs (Staiff 2008), including the notion of ‘wilderness’ (Gomez-Pompa and Kaus 1992; Reynolds 2003). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) and others also argue that no object, monument, building or site should be labelled solely as tangible heritage. Rather, it is the meanings and values attributed to them – their intangible dimensions – that give these items significance. The separation of the past from the present (Byrne 2007) is another complication in the heritage discourse. Further, a values approach to heritage protection (for example, The Burra Charter 1999, see Australia ICOMOS 2000; see also Byrne et al. 2003), while viewed as progressive and crucial for many involved in the debates and the practices, is not well understood and in many communities is considered extremely abstract because it ‘appears’ to deny important metaphysical properties of things that are special.5
Likewise, the distinction between tangible, intangible and living heritage denies the complexity of shifting heritage discourse. ICOMOS itself acknowledges the very slipperiness of the concepts that underpin the heritage system. The Québec Declaration for the Preservation of Spirit of Place notes it is ‘a continuously reconstructed process, which responds to the needs for change and continuity of communities’ (ICOMOS 2008: 3).
The notion of ‘change and continuity’ is at the very heart of the perceptual and empirical tensions that have a constant pulse in heritage places, with the change/continuity dialogue setting in motion contestations around who should be arbitrators of what is important, what should be protected and who should be empowered to make such decisions. The heritage system on one hand speaks eloquently to community empowerment and custodianship and on the other retracts from and reacts against processes of (local) democratisation, which threaten the system’s authority.
Debate also surrounds ‘World Heritage’ in particular, for example regarding the ideology of ascribing such status to certain periods of history, certain sites and places, monuments, cultural and religious edifices and practices and, ipso facto, the exclusion of so much (Wall and Black 2005; Smith 2006; Winter 2007). Others are concerned with the contradictions and tensions arising from the sustenance and safeguarding of cultural practices while denying inherent change and fluidity around the importance and meaning of such practices and of ‘papering over’ other histories and experiences (Byrne 2007). The effects of globalisation concern many, with some regarding the system of World Heritage itself a globalising project (Turtinen 2000; Dearborn and Stallmeyer 2010). Other contradictions emerge from a process that celebrates diversity and uniqueness and yet is essentially about conformity. The significant imbalance in representativeness of sites in terms of geographies of wealth, power, location, religious affiliation and identity; and the imbalance in power relations between local, national and international are also of concern (Black and Wall 2001), reflecting a belief that the system is too heavily Eurocentric (ICOMOS 2004; Ashworth and van der Aa 2006; Millar 2006) and neo-colonial (Shepherd 2006). The role of experts and professionals; the use of standardised categories and definitions; notions of ‘authenticity’, ‘integrity’, ‘protection’ and ‘the safeguarding of material culture’ are all criticised as western/middle class constructs and viewed by many critics as not only highly contested but quite arbitrary.6 Smith (2006) likens UNESCO and the affiliated heritage organisations governing World Heritage sites not so much as a system, rather as a collection of knowledge – as an ‘authorised heritage discourse’; a discourse of ideas and language that justifies its own dominance. As Turtinen (2000: 6) sees it:
World Heritage is constructed from and entails the construction of humankind as a moral and imagined community through the work of transnational processes in the world polity […] World Heritage is a cosmopolitan political project [which is both] altering nation-state responsibilities [and] entails the formation of new forms of cultural/political alliance and solidarity [that is] global in scale and inherently globalising [through its] standardising and regulating processes and measures.
Some would regard this as a major criticism, yet others consider these globalising and standardising elements as strengths of the system. Concerns are also expressed about the core concept of ‘World Heritage’; the idea of ‘outstanding universal value’. Heritage is a dynamic cultural ecology of perceptions and values with loci that constantly shuffle between local, regional and national representations and discourses. But ‘universal value’ requires a cosmopolitan perspective of constant global comparisons. This perspective is beyond the reach of most who are the inhabitants and therefore, in theory, the custodians of many World Heritage places, especially in the developing world. So, whose values and perceptions (armed with scientific empiricism) are protected in that which is declared as having ‘outstanding universal value’?
Another concern is the increasing number of sites with World Heritage designation. For some this is because it is becoming difficult to fund and properly care for the existing sites. For others the list is not balanced in geographic or socio-political-cultural representation and too few sites are inscribed for natural values. Others consider that increasing the number of sites devalues the status of World Heritage. ‘To the layperson World Heritage is often assumed to be akin to being one of the Seven Wonders of the World – the assumption being that it must be extremely rare and exceptional’ (Redbanks and TBR 2009: 7). Current research shows when respondents learnt that there were in fact some 8907 inscribed sites, the ‘typical response was “Oh. … I didn’t realize there were so many” the tone being one of disappointment’ (Redbanks and TBR 2009: 7). The process is also regarded as becoming overly and overtly political,8 raising ‘issues of the future credibility of the Convention’ (Putney 2010: 1).
For others, including UNESCO itself, the key criticism is that while the purpose of World Heritage designation is the protection of heritage, paradoxically the conservation objectives are threatened by the desire of many and the tourism potential of these sites, transformed into ‘iconic attractions’ by their inscription. World Heritage is emblematic of so much that is at stake, what is irreplaceable, negotiable and perhaps not negotiable. For places inscribed as World Heritage the full force of international and national laws and processes come into play invoking a multitude of regulations and responsibilities for local people and custodians, whether or not the juridical comes anywhere near to local perceptions of what is valued in a community’s environment. The nation-states signatory to the World Heritage Convention make considerable effort and financial commitment to have sites, properties and cities inscribed as World Heritage. The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport found that the average cost of inscription in the UK, for example, was estimated as being £462,000 (Redbanks and TBR 2009) leading to a national debate about the costs and benefits of World Heritage designation. While costs may be much lower in other places (especially in developing countries), there is undeniably a considerable priority given to securing World Heritage listing. World Heritage sites are acknowledged as highly symbolic sources of national and local pride, with considerable economic stimulus potential.
World Heritage and Tourism: Iconic Brand or Conflicting Values?
Whilst conservationists recognise visitation to be an important mechanism for the presentation and transmission of heritage values (as required by the Convention) issues of scale, volume and distribution of tourism pressures threaten what is defined as the ‘integrity of sites’. For many tourism operators and associated communities World Heritage sites represent catalysts for economic growth. Equally, it is generally recognised that financial and social benefits can be derived from heritage places for conservation purposes, for poverty alleviation and for the benefit of local communities through education, employment and engagement processes. However, the most effective means to manage this relationship remains elusive, despite the widespread attempts to do so.
According to Henry Cleere (2006), the ICOMOS World Heritage Co-ordinator for a decade, one of the improvements made to the system was the requirement for evidence of ‘an appropriate management plan or other documented management system’. Cleere considers ‘it is axiomatic that management implies presentation to the public’ (ibid.: xxi). However, he also notes the ‘mere act of listing may increase visitor numbers […] many times over’ (ibid.: xxi). The effects of massive increases in visitor numbers at Machu Picchu in Peru (UNESCO 2007) and Ha Long Bay in Vietnam (Hamilton-Smith 2007) serve as examples of what can happen when there is inadequate visitor management and deficient sustainable tourism policies and practices at what Cleere calls ‘honey-pot’ sites. The Galapagos Islands site, amongst the first natural sites inscribed in 1975, was placed on the World Heritage In Danger List due to the impacts of human activity on islands that were previously uninhabited and are now a thriving tourism destination (UNESCO 2007).9
Despite assertions about visitor numbers increasing, Redbanks and TBR (2009) found that if a site is already established as a tourism destination the effect of inscription is negligible. They also noted that the quite large differentials in motivation, actions and performance at individual sites were more important determinants than inscription on any increases in tourism (ibid.). Nevertheless, the World Heritage brand is important. Some visitors see these sites as a ‘collectable set’ (Buckley 2004). The brand provides the tourism industry with destinations that are amongst the most popular and heavily promoted attractions, especially in developing countries. Conservation policy makers increasingly use the ‘benefits of tourism’ as one of the justifications for heritage listing. While World Heritage designation is not intended as a marketing device, it may certainly have this effect. And if inscription continues to become a political process separate from the assessment of criteria as laid down by the Convention and its protocols, then the tourist dollar steps in as a vital economic driver and rationale for designation.
Under Article II, Section 5 of the Explanatory Notes to the Operational Guidelines (UNESCO 2008), signatory nations are required to report on World Heritage properties. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre, in a review of the national monitoring and periodic reporting process, noted that as many as twenty-five per cent of sites are reporting negative impacts from visitation, with tourism the second most reported threat after development pressures (UNESCO 2007). Some suggest more targeted marketing as a means of ‘eliminating undesirable impacts’, but the practice can have its own consequences including the formation of what Edensor (1998) called ‘enclavic spaces’ – homogenised, sanitised and heavily regulated. Evidence also suggests many false assumptions in this approach that do not actually avoid the conundrums of the heritage-tourism-place interactions (see analysis and examples in Waterton and Watson 2010a, 2010b).
By separating tourism off as a distinct ontological entity without reference to anything else, such as neo-liberal economic systems, modernity, mobility and the flows of people (such as translocation into towns and cities from rural areas), tourism appears to be a problem that could or should be dealt with in isolation. Viewed in the wider context, tourism is seen rather as a vehicle and manifestation of these broader changes. This entanglement of course complicates the picture, but is conveniently ignored in tourism impact studies.
The IUCN analysed key official documents prepared in the last four years (2006 to 2010) relating to natural World Heritage sites (Borges et al. 2010). The study sought to identify gaps in current understanding of how tourism development affects natural sites and how best to facilitate conservation processes and economic growth. The study noted considerable variation in how the different players (tourism industry, tourists, local authorities) each contributed to these effects and which players might be considered the drivers of change (ibid.). While the methodology (using reports that considered tourism in isolation) puts greater onus on tourism, rather than seeing it as part of socio-economic change, the study did conclude that better knowledge of the integration of site governance, management, land-use planning, tourism development and management was necessary to determine how World Heritage status and its mechanisms might more effectively be used to address these challenges (ibid.).
Setting aside the problematic methodological issues (like setting out to find tourism impacts), the key undesirable changes to World Heritage properties linked to unsustainable growth in visitor numbers relate to infrastructure development, pollution, severe effects on the diversity of an area through physical changes plus social impacts including congestion, heavy traffic and vandalism, as well as unrealised expectations. According to Pedersen (2002) disappointment for both visitors and the local community can often be associated with tourism development at World Heritage sites. The IUCN study found examples where locals become antagonistic toward the heritage management authority if expectations that nomination would bring about major development boosts are not realised, not just in terms of tourism but also community infrastructure such as health and transport (Borges et al. 2010). On the other hand, well planned tourism is also attributed with providing infrastructure and enhancing the conservation and community development goals and values of sites (ibid.).
Sites such as Ha Long Bay World Heritage site, Vietnam, have seen pollution and waste become a considerable problem over time. This illustrates the problems that typically arise (and are invariably ascribed to tourism) when an area is designated as World Heritage. It also serves to illustrate some of the challenges about how these issues might be better understood and how alternatives to managing public resources might ensure both tourism and heritage management are considered part of the dynamic of community development, rather than tourism being regarded as a hurtling billiard ball and heritage and community nonsensically separated from each other and from development.
Ha Long Bay is located in Quang Ninh Province off the northeast coast of Vietnam, comprised of almost 2000 limestone karst islands and islets, with 775 included in the core zone of the World Heritage site (Haynes 2008). It is ranked third as a tourism destination by visitor numbers, after Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City. Tourism brings important economic benefits as the key industry in the province (worth VND 2,400 billion in 2008; QNACST 2009). Local people work in hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, on boats and in souvenirs shops. Fishermen provide seafood and guide services for tourists. Tourism has grown rapidly around 20 per cent per year, since inscription as World Heritage in 1994. The government has made a significant investment in tourism infrastructure – increasing the number of hotels, restaurants, attractions, entertainment, administration and promotional activities abroad.
In 2001 Ha Long Bay received 1.97 million visitors, about a third of international arrivals to Vietnam. There has been a massive 213 per cent increase in just seven years, with 4.2 million visitors in 2008 (now 55 per cent international; ibid.). This is a very demanding rate of change that introduces strong dynamics into the local ecosystem and local socio-economic environments that are far more geographically concentrated than the development witnessed elsewhere in Vietnam other than major cities. How these dynamics will evolve involves a complex interplay between policy, legal, managerial, communal and individual responses and interventions whether active or passive. At some point – perhaps already – critical tipping points will be reached (e.g., ecological, overcrowding, aesthetic deterioration, health and the quality of life of the inhabitants, economic production).
The main attraction is a visit to the Bay by boat concentrated in a few relatively small areas within the core zone (Haynes 2008). Most visitors are on package tours. The major source markets are from within Asia particularly China, with an average length of stay in Ha Long Bay only 1.5 days. There are now 74 hotels with 15,087 beds, plus guesthouses supplying another 6,728 beds. The city has 111 restaurants and many small cafes (QNACST 2009). Management interventions have been designed to ‘reduce the impacts of tourism’ (ibid.). For example, all tour boats must have a license. The number is restricted to 400 local boats: 100 with 40 – 50 overnight berths and 300 day tour only boats. In addition there are up to 400 international cruise ships per year, in 2008 carrying a total of 167,300 passengers (ibid.). Despite the licensing system there remains an issue with the effect on the environmental integrity of the site, since most boats do not have adequate methods for waste disposal and/or management. Health and quality assurance problems have been well documented and are a concern to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (Haynes 2008).
In response to the challenges, IUCN has been providing management planning, training and technical assistance through a UNF Institutional Strengthening Project providing environmental, protected area and tourism management expertise (WHC 2009). The growth of tourism has been considered a success in creating jobs but has also created migration and population increases. Local people may not benefit as expected if jobs go to better skilled people moving to the area. The price of food, accommodation and general goods in Ha Long city are now more expensive than in other localities. This negatively affects the wellbeing and quality of life for those in the lower socio-economic groups, pushing poverty deeper into the local community despite the successful economic growth (Bushell and Powis 2009).
Figure 16.1 Tour boats in Ha Long Bay (Photo R.Bushell)
The World Heritage State of Conservation report (WHC 2009) identified population growth, increased tourism pressure, urbanisation and the absence of an integrated planning approach as the main threats to the ‘integrity’ of the site. The visited grottos become overcrowded during the high season, reducing the visitors’ experience and causing damage to the caves in turn, a major concern for visitors and their sense of conservation. Crowding and inappropriate development around the area are seen by heritage professionals to detract from the World Heritage values.
The economic development includes land reclamation, transport, residential development, dredging of the shipping channel and related port development and creates a range of environmental problems. These include a significant loss of the mangrove habitat that once acted as a natural mitigation system. The activities combine to result in greatly reduced water quality, degradation of the underwater landscape and loss of biodiversity, especially coral reefs and seagrass beds. The number of boats increases pollution through fuel leaks, oil spills, bilge discharge, exhaust fumes, human waste, rubbish and stirring up sediment in the relatively shallow waters of the bay (Haynes 2008). Cigarette butts have been identified as a problem for the island ecology (Hamilton-Smith 2007). The State of Conservation report also notes over-exploitation of the marine resources to supply the tourism trade, inadequate waste management systems, low levels of awareness and illegal settlement as major challenges (WHC 2009). Locals report concerns about the effects of these developments on their health and wellbeing (Bushell and Powis 2009). Such scenarios and the associated problems are mirrored in other World Heritage sites. Even where a World Heritage protected area has a plan of management, problems have arisen. Is this because the language embedded in the thinking behind the IUCN concept of a plan of management is not compatible with conceptual frameworks that operate in Vietnam? Does the intent become lost in translation and present yet another challenge to the whole enterprise of World Heritage? Or is it that tourism activity needs to be continually contextualised by the other change agents operating in Vietnam and South East Asia more generally?
Tourism is as much a symptom as it is an agent of change in such places (Theerapappisit 2008). To describe the problem as ‘tourism impact’ or poor tourism planning is far too simplistic, masking considerable complexity. For example, we note the complex intersection of the science (regarding ecology, biodiversity and disease) and local cultural perceptions and behaviours, along with the differing demands from visitors bringing varying perceptions about the environment, health and safety. Into this mix are the varying responses of different government departments and private investors with disparate motivations, policy and political agendas. Some of the controls put in place to manage tourism actually set up distinctions that restrict economic advantage and concentrate wealth. So the problems are multifaceted, affecting a range of interests and concerns and demonstrate just some of the messiness and complexity relating to such places.
Would a more holistic consideration of community development (that is, health and wellbeing, housing, education and employment, investment and development) yield strategies that would better conserve and protect the natural environment because the link to health and economic benefit would put together all factors in play for consideration? Compartmentalised thinking tends to yield strategies, such as economic development, which create problems for others, such as health promotion or heritage protection.
Converging Forces: Modernity, Mobilities and Memories
UNESCO World Heritage Centre recognises that these issues occur in many places, not just Ha Long Bay and that there is a need to realign the relationship between visitation, the tourism industry, site management, and local community in such a way that a re-configuration would enable tourism to contribute to sustaining the outstanding universal value and support local places. But this does not necessarily dig deep enough. What is being sustained if ‘outstanding universal value’ is itself problematic and more rhetorical than real? There are several inherent challenges in this aspiration. First, many World Heritage site management authorities have an uneasy relationship with the tourism industry because of their different and sometimes conflicting priorities (Tapper and Cochrane 2005). If these sites are to contribute to sustaining local values they must be valued by local people. But this puts the onus of heritage on managers and the heritage system rather than inverting this thinking. What is valued by local people needs to be recognised and taken on-board by the World Heritage apparatus. After all, whose values are ultimately being protected? It is, after all, the complex web of meaning-making and place attachments infused with mythology, spirituality, cultural productions of all kinds, every-day life, ritual and beliefs that map people’s relationships to place and begin to produce what we may call ‘heritage effects’, not something as abstract – and as foreign – as ‘outstanding universal value’ and all the criteria it has generated.
Genuinely involving communities in the decision-making presents its own set of challenges and complexities. Not the least is the difficult task of trying to reach agreement on what is desirable. And of course consensus is not necessarily itself a desirable/expected outcome in all socio-political circumstances. There is also the issue of determining who is regarded as local, and what is regarded, and by whom, as ‘balancing’ conservation with development aspirations. Not only are places transformed to suit the needs of tourism, in the case of World Heritage, places are also transformed to comply with the needs of heritage professionals and to conform to the requirements of the inscription process. Concepts like ‘integrity’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘monitoring’ the protection of a site’s values can be very influential on the life and regulation of a place, ‘altering’, as Turtinen (2000) suggested, ‘nation-state responsibilities’.
In Luang Prabang, a World Heritage town in Laos, UNESCO regulations control what can be built, where, in what style and using what materials in order to preserve its World Heritage features (Dearborn and Stallmeyer 2010). Equally it mandates what can be removed and this includes cultural practices (such as animal husbandry and banning the keeping of livestock in house yards within the World Heritage core) as well as architectural fabric. And even with the careful watch of the Heritage Department, the on-site management team and the State party, UNESCO has threatened to place Luang Prabang on the ‘World Heritage In Danger’ list due to excessive changes ostensibly brought about by modernisation and the growth of the town, paradoxically in response to the success of heritage tourism to what is regarded as a unique and special place. And even more ironically for locals aspiring to a better standard of living, a UNESCO and ICOMOS Mission report (2007: 2) states:
[…] illegal building activities include the demolition and reconstruction of listed properties, over-densification of the urban fabric and use of inappropriate typologies/materials/ decoration for new buildings. This is leading to the loss of important elements of the historic urban landscape, in particular the Lao traditional structures.
The Mission recommended that the government be prevented from realigning the airport runway. At the moment, aircraft are limited in size but also have to fly over the historic town. If realigned, Laos authorities from the Heritage Department believe it will greatly improve air safety (on the ground and in the air), reduce noise in the core heritage zone and allow jet aircraft like Boeing 737s to land. UNESCO worries that this change may significantly increase visitor numbers and incumbent pressures. The locals worry about having a viable flow of visitors. In the hot-wet season numbers drop to around 20–40 per cent occupancy and employment declines as a consequence. Lao PDR is ranked 133 out of 182 on the UNDP human development index and has around 30.7 per cent of its population living on less than US$ 1.25 per day (UNDP 2010), so tourism centred around Luang Prabang is regarded as vital to the improvement in national prosperity and wellbeing. The struggle of the staff at Heritage House in Luang Prabang to deal with the day-to-day pressures of working with a diverse community, government regulations as well as politically onerous demands from the external bodies of UNESCO and ICOMOS, with many assumed linguistic, technical and conceptual knowledges, are symptomatic of the radical fissure between the lived experience of Luang Prabang and what looks like World Heritage technocratic language emanating out of Paris and the advisory bodies (see Byrne 2007; Byrne et al. 2003).
Local concerns, however, once again raise the important question of just who are supposed to be the locals? In the case of Luang Prabang, a small remote rural town of around 22,000 people, the ‘local’ is a rather eclectic mix. Most of the population is Laotian (ethnic designation being a national policy) with some Vietnamese and Chinese, mostly born in Laos but not necessarily from the local area. As a key regional centre, the town attracts many secondary and tertiary students, the latter providing a large percentage of the tourism workforce. The Laotian population consists of many ‘official’ ethnic minorities (despite these minorities collectively making up the majority of the population), with twelve distinct minorities in the Luang Prabang province. Those who are not from the majority Lao groups, communities who identify themselves (or are identified by others) as Hmong or Kmu for example, have a different socioeconomic status and a very different access to and relationship with decision makers. These ethnic groupings are themselves very fluid: ‘socio-economic and political circumstances change, and the natural […] influencing between cultures results in a constant evolution and blurring of ethnic divisions’ (TAEC 2010). Likewise, the Laos-Thai border region is quite close and the cultural mix is complex. Others living in Luang Prabang are Laotian-born who have grown up overseas and recently returned from France, Australia, the USA and other places of exile. Some of these have retained Lao citizenship while others have lost it. Some ‘locals’ are Thai, European and North American among others, married to a Laotian and with families and local businesses. Luang Prabang, despite its rurality, has a very global dimension not just because of tourism but because of the presence of its expatriate community of powerful interests and the inflow of foreign capital for both conservation work and business development. Indeed, the key personnel at Heritage House are people who themselves have come to Luang Prabang from elsewhere. This further complicates intentions to work with ‘locals’ and to bring community development, heritage and tourism together. The case of Luang Prabang points to the tension in the dialectic of conservation versus economic growth. Is this not too simplistic an analytic? What is required is a more complex and nuanced understanding that recognises and empowers local knowledge systems, understandings, priorities and values and moves beyond the binary of conservation versus development and the idea that they should be ‘balanced’.
Concern too surrounds the way ‘tourism transforms heritage places into commodified tourist space[s]’ (Winter 2004: 343) through the process of ‘performing’ heritage for visitors. However, even this process is further complicated by the differences between western and Asian tourists (Winter et al. 2009). On the one hand, South East Asian countries are frequently conceived of and experienced by western visitors via a long history of Orientalism. For centuries Europeans have manufactured Asian cultures within their own representational and discursive practices (Said 1985). Western tourists therefore see Luang Prabang through this prism. Their own identity is never seriously challenged, they maintain control and power in many interactions and they unavoidably perpetuate in their photography and story-telling the Orientalist assumptions that have preceded them. In so doing western tourism has produced fissures and issues of identity within those thus affected by this process, that is, by the subjects of Orientalist narratives. In what contexts can the Laotians ‘speak’ or ‘perform’ as Laotians when they are continually negotiating with the west in heritage and tourist spaces? The referent, in heritage and tourism interactions is often the ‘west’. The Laotian staff of Heritage House in Luang Prabang communicate with UNESCO in English or French; they receive all communications from the World Heritage Centre in Paris in the official (European) languages of UNESCO and the reports they wrestle with have been written by western experts. Similarly, English is the lingua franca of tourism. Does the portrayal of ‘outstanding universal value’ and the criteria by which a World Heritage site is inscribed work to suppress local understandings and values for a place or cultural tradition? Does it ignore them, confuse them and introduce a ‘foreign’ conception that then mediates local values with perhaps powerful effects? Does World Heritage listing and the packaged nature of the tourist experience unwittingly conspire to exclude the local voice? The answer would seem to be ‘unavoidably yes’ because to be heard the ‘local’ must always be translated into the languages and epistemologies of the ‘west’.
Figure 16.2 Morning ritual of tak baad, the giving of alms (Photo R. Bushell)
Figure 16.3 Novice monks walking along main street Luang Prabang in World Heritage core that has seen many shop houses converted for tourism purposes such as cafés, souvenir sales and accommodation (Photo R. Bushell)
Touring Cultures
Invariably, the western heritage tourist has more connection to what is signified by ‘World Heritage’ places than ‘local’ people who have a very different reality, experience and understanding of ‘their’ place. However, the World Heritage system continually asks the people of Luang Prabang to translate these realities and understandings via conceptual language not of their making. Indeed, the very word heritage in Lao is a recently made-up word with a western definition. Tourists however do not deal with depth and complexity, nor with contestation, and so as Winter rightly observes ‘cultural tourism serves to marginalise alternative understandings of heritage and memory’ (Winter 2004: 343). Winter (2006) also provides a thoughtful understanding of the praxis of tourist consumption and how consumption actively occurs through embodied experiences, and is constructed both discursively and via selective representations of tourist places and landscapes where highly selective narratives and images are appropriated, (re)produced and (re)circulated, rather than via the more passive gaze Urry describes (1990). In a highly mobile world, places are not fixed but are sites of movement and change, with tourism a very active player among several (Urry 2006).
It is also necessary to problematise tourists. Like locals they are not a homogenous group and ‘the tourist’ is not a singular subject (Winter et al. 2009). They do not share a universal heritage, histories, backgrounds, knowledges, expectations, behaviours or experiences. Like the heritage places and people they visit, they are complex and diverse. As Rojek and Urry (1997) note, the term ‘tourist’ is problematic because its meaning slides across different social forms of the ‘other’. Tourists are relatives, travellers, academics, scientists, business people, workers, students and so on. They have many reasons for being temporally in a place, for visiting heritage sites and they bring these reasons to their meaning making of these places. And tourists are not just westerners. The presence of Asian tourists from widely diverse and divergent cultures – Thailand, China, Japan and Korea – sets up yet another and different set of transformations that are not the same as those that have their locus in the ‘west’ (Winter et al. 2009). In Cambodia, for example, domestic visitors who go to Angkor to celebrate the rebuilding of their nation after decades of war and political unrest cannot easily be subsumed into western notions of the tourist, whereas international western tourists commonly bring orientalised fantasies of exploration and the discovery of the other to their Angkor visit (Winter 2007). Among domestic visitors, travel patterns, behaviours and understandings of a place’s significance also vary greatly depending on many personal factors. Simultaneously the ‘international’ visitor is increasingly from China, Thailand and other South East Asian nations with very different patterns of connection and histories compared to the various Anglophonic groups. Equally, ‘the tourism industry’ is another problematic phrase – fixed, bounded and value-laden with ideas that wrongly presuppose certain shared behaviours, attitudes and numerous operational/managerial characteristics of size and scale, among others. Indeed, ‘tourism is a situated, multiple, dynamic and lacks any essential or overarching quality. It changes continually and is a site of contestation, generating a host of competing discourses and practices about place, identity and culture’ (Edensor 2007: xvi). Thus, there are many assumptions about ‘heritage’, ‘locals’, ‘tourists’ and the ‘industry’ needing to be unsettled to enable the complexity, relational connections, unevenness and fluidity to be better understood. Tourism, like heritage, is a dynamic and complex cultural expression that needs to be decentred from fixed modes of thinking and supposedly stable categories.
The Place(s) of World Heritage
On one level, World Heritage sites are self-contained and bounded spaces because of practical and legal reasons (managers have little or no power to control actions outside the conservation zone) and yet on another level heritage sites are intricately entangled in broader geographies, political, cultural, environmental and so forth. Byrne (2007: xiv) recalls the World Heritage rice terraces of Banaue in the Philippines where ‘the farmers seemed keen to embrace modernity, the national elite and the heritage industry wanted to take both them and their terraces out of circulation, anchoring them firmly in an unchanging and, most importantly, visitable past’. Many benefits accrue from developing regional strategies, but what of the localised social consequences of these actions? UNESCO understands that ‘centralised control of heritage by fortress conservation has been ineffective … collaborative management offers a positive alternative’ (Edroma 2003: 37).
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, scholars have criticised the way in which World Heritage sites can become ‘trapped in time’. Smith (2006: 274) questions the UNESCO philosophy of ‘conserve as found’, claiming ‘otherwise it ceases to be heritage and to have ongoing cultural meaning’. Adams (1997) discusses Torajan communities of Indonesia excluded from development programs because the construction of new infrastructure might offend international tourists. The so-called ‘authentic’ landscape can become unalterable, a static manifestation of tourist visual expectations, or the experts’ advice, or both. Assuming, also, a particular point in time that is of greatest importance in the heritage of a place.
The ethics surrounding World Heritage places are complicated. They are so designated because of the great importance attached to them. It is understood that well-planned and executed tourism can contribute to increased respect for diversity of all sorts – biological, cultural, religious and political. Poor nations lacking in raw materials can be extremely wealthy in cultural resources.
While tourism alone, with its many cultural and economic dimensions, is unable to solve deep-rooted structural problems of long-term poverty, it has a vital role to play when linked to other aspects of development (Robinson and Picard 2006). ‘Tourism’ can be a critical component in marshalling global support for heritage conservation, poverty alleviation and Indigenous community wellbeing. The dramatic growth of visitation is seen to be threatening the core values of some sites, the meaning for local custodians and, ironically, the attractiveness of the site to the visitors themselves (Figgis and Bushell 2007). However, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004: 58) points out, ‘[c]hange is intrinsic to culture, and measures to preserve, conserve, safeguard and sustain particular cultural practices are [paradoxically] caught between freezing the practice and addressing the inherently processual nature of culture’. She considers the ‘heritage enterprise’ as a ‘metacultural phenomenon in its own right [which] attempt[s] to slow the rate of change’ (ibid.), while tourism is regarded, by many, as a potent catalyst for hastening change. The implications of such a deep paradox cannot be over-estimated.
Entangled Relationships
Consequently, the interface between World Heritage sites and tourism is often described as fraught; a double-edged sword, Janus-like, a dangerous liaison. These metaphors point to the complexity of the interaction and to the representations of the perception of the relationship as being either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ (Staiff and Ongkhluap forthcoming). Effects have therefore come to define the relationship between heritage and tourism. It’s an addictive, although entirely understandable, analysis. Do ever-increasing visitor numbers and the associated infrastructure development compromise the integrity of World Heritage sites? Can tourism be a sustainable vehicle for the development of communities living within or on the boundaries of World Heritage sites? Does the very presence of tourism produce a series of largely corrosive effects – to the very fabric of cultural landscapes, to the well being of ecosystems, to the culture of local communities, to the social dynamics of local communities? Or does this ‘cause and effect’ logic quickly come to dominate governing perceptions? It represents relatively wide-spread thinking and is quite persuasive, but is it not an analytic that should be questioned as one saturated with cultural assumptions?
Productive relationships between tourism, heritage conservation and community development require that the ‘local’ is empowered in its relationship to a global institution like UNESCO and is allowed to grow and change. With over 900 million annual international arrivals worldwide (UNWTO 2010) and many times more domestic visitors, tourism growth is expected to continue exponentially, reinforcing the critical need to manage – with management models that make sense at the local level – the tangible and intangible heritage resources on which tourism relies, and in a manner that equally responds to what ‘heritage’ may mean in the context of South East Asian countries – to the things communities like Luang Prabang feel are most precious about the town within which they live. Such responses may not strictly correspond to the way a town is delineated as a World Heritage site, but at the same time that which is valued and taken care of, that which is considered ‘the spirit of the place’, however defined, can potentially fuse with the more technocratic conception of heritage and heritage conservation management.
Designation of a place as World Heritage with ‘outstanding universal value’ should not displace or suppress local values (Wall and Black 2005) nor remove the complexity and contested socio-political associations that always infuse place-ness. This relocates the ethical responsibility professionals have regarding the present, the future and particularly the peoples it most concerns. The emerging and critical obligation is to find processes that are inclusive in the planning, in the development of opportunities, in the use of local knowledge and value systems, in dealing with the power relationships intrinsically involved. Thomas (1991) in his postcolonial ethnographies illustrated the powerful use of ‘entanglement’ as a way to move thinking and practices beyond fixed structures and categories. Entanglement suggests a dynamic intermingling of objects, systems, peoples, lived lives, symbols, histories, cultural practices within specific places/landscapes. It supposes that everything is relational, messy, in process, complex, dynamic; that ‘reality’ does not exist in neat categories. World Heritage sites are inherently complex places and unstable conceptual entities. They are places with multiple values and meanings (Wall and Black 2005), they are contested because of competing stakeholder groups and various signifying practices (Owens 2002), they are local sites where global forces converge (Teo et al. 2001; Cole 2008) and they are often intrinsic to nation-building projects (Thompson 2005; Winter 2007). They are sites of movement and dynamism. In a heritage place this includes a flow of bodies around monuments and through spaces that is of the moment: a flow of different bodies, different histories, different sexualities, different genders, different cultures, different purposes and so on. The heritage place, rather than a static and composed space – something already there ‘waiting to be visited’ (Crouch 2002, 2010; Urry 2006) – is something produced by the corporeal and social performance of the visitor, by the practice of the visit (Crouch 2002, 2010; Baerenholdt et al. 2004; Staiff 2008) and the performance of the local.
Therefore, thinking about tourism as a critical component of fostering support for biological and cultural heritage conservation values as they are currently manifested in the World Heritage system, needs to be cognisant of culturally inscribed notions of planning and management. It requires new efforts of negotiation between as many of the players as possible and in a spirit that empowers the local in meaningful and not just symbolic ways, and it demands a way of thinking that does not place in a hierarchy of power relationships the fixed over the dynamic.
Notes
1 For current Operational Guidelines and all revisions since the inauguration in 1997, see UNESCO (2010b).
2 At the 34th meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Brasilia in August 2010 an additional thirty- two sites submitted by State parties were considered for inscription. Twenty-one were endorsed taking the total from 890 to 911. This includes three from nations that previously had no World Heritage listed sites. In 2011, the current total is 936.
3 Under Articles 1 & 2 of the World Heritage Convention (UNESCO 1972) the criterion for listing is ‘outstanding universal value’ from historic, aesthetic, ethnological, anthropological, art or science points of view for ‘cultural heritage’ and scientific, conservation or aesthetic viewpoints for ‘natural heritage’. This is reiterated and expanded in Operational Guidelines (UNESCO 2008).
4 Together the IUCN, ICOMOS and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) serve as advisory bodies to the intergovernmental committee of UNESCO, the World Heritage Committee, in the process of nomination, evaluation, inscription and monitoring of World Heritage sites under the Convention.
5 This is a values approach to heritage protection, but is viewed as progressive because it recognises that ‘heritage’ is a cultural process, rather than an exclusively material culture with innate properties.
6 For a critical review of UNESCO initiatives and policies including concepts of tangible and intangible heritage as the focus of heritage conservation see Turtinen (2000) and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004).
7 At the time of the research. See note 2 for updated figures.
8 This observation is extracted from reports from IUCN observers at the 34th meeting of the WHC in Brasilia in 2010 (see Putney 2010).
9 It was removed from the ‘In Danger List’ at the 2010 session of the World Heritage Committee, though this decision immediately raised criticism (see The Economist 2010).
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