Who owns heritage? The community that created it? The nation that legally protects it? The tourists who visit and fund it? Or humanity as a whole? Your answer will determine what kind of governance you think heritage deserves.
THE GOVERNANCE LANDSCAPE
Heritage tourism operates within overlapping layers of governance: international frameworks, national institutions, and local actors. Each level has different tools, priorities, and blind spots.
International level: UNESCO frameworks
The 1972 World Heritage Convention introduced the concept of “outstanding universal value” – the idea that certain cultural and natural sites belong not only to the nations that host them, but to all of humanity. It created the World Heritage List, now comprising over 1,100 sites. Inscription brings international recognition and funding, but also pressure: listed sites attract more visitors, which generates exactly the over-tourism pressures the convention was meant to prevent. Venice, Dubrovnik, and Machu Picchu are all World Heritage Sites facing this paradox.
The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH took a different approach. Rather than listing outstanding monuments, it centers living traditions and the communities that sustain them. Communities, not governments or experts, are the primary custodians. Safeguarding, not freezing, is the goal.
Together, these two conventions reflect a fundamental evolution in thinking: from protecting exceptional objects to supporting living cultures.
National and local level
Ministries of culture set legal frameworks for heritage protection. Tourism boards manage visitor flows, marketing, and infrastructure. Local councils make day-to-day decisions about development, zoning, and access. NGOs act as watchdogs, innovators, and bridges between institutions and communities.
The risk at this level is fragmentation: when ministries, tourism boards, and local governments pursue different priorities, heritage falls between institutional mandates. Effective governance requires coordination mechanisms that bring these actors into dialogue – ideally with the community at the table.
Batana and Kumrovec as governance models:
The Batana Eco-Museum began as a community association and grew into an internationally recognized institution through sustained collaboration with local authorities, cultural networks, and eventually UNESCO. Its governance structure – community-led, institutionally supported – is precisely what made it sustainable. Kumrovec demonstrates how shared responsibility between a museum, local artisans, and municipal government can maintain authenticity while developing tourism economically.
THE ETHICAL TRIANGLE: ACCESS, PROTECTION, IDENTITY
Effective heritage governance must balance three competing imperatives:
- Access – Heritage should be inclusive: available to local communities and visitors, affordable, and not captured by elite or commercial interests. Restricted access can also harm heritage by cutting it off from the community that sustains it.
- Protection – Physical sites, living traditions, and social fabric are all vulnerable. Over-tourism causes erosion, displacement, and homogenization. Climate change threatens coastal and low-lying heritage sites. Governance must set limits – on visitor numbers, on commercial development, on the pace of change.
- Identity – Heritage must remain a source of meaning for the community that holds it, not only a product for external consumption. When governance prioritizes economic returns over cultural integrity, heritage loses its function as a carrier of identity and becomes mere scenery.
These three imperatives are genuinely in tension. Maximum access conflicts with protection. Strong protection can restrict community use. Identity concerns may conflict with the simplifications that make heritage accessible to outside visitors. Good governance does not eliminate these tensions – it manages them transparently and with the community’s interests primary.
Ethical tourism in practice:
- Visitor caps and timed entry systems (applied in Machu Picchu, Pompeii, several Venetian sites).
- Benefit-sharing mechanisms that direct a proportion of tourism income into community development funds.
- Community veto rights over major tourism development decisions.
- Heritage impact assessments before new infrastructure or programming is introduced.
- Transparency in how visitor data, revenue, and management decisions are made and reported.
ACTIVITIES
Activity 1 – Policy Brief (Individual | 20 min)
Choose a heritage site you know (or Batana / Kumrovec / Venice).
Draft a 150-word policy recommendation that addresses all three sides of the ethical triangle: what specific measure would improve access without harming protection? What limit would you set? How would you keep community identity central?
Activity 2 – Simulation (Group | 20 min)
Your group is a municipal heritage council. A major hotel chain wants to build a 200-room resort adjacent to an open-air heritage museum similar to Kumrovec. The project promises 150 jobs and significant tourism revenue. Simulate the council meeting: one member represents the community association, one the tourism board, one the ministry of culture, one an NGO. What decision do you reach? What conditions, if any, do you attach?
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
- Should tourism be treated primarily as an opportunity or a threat for heritage? Can it be both at once?
- Is UNESCO’s concept of “outstanding universal value” compatible with community-centered governance? Who decides what is outstanding?
- When visitor numbers harm a site, who should pay the cost of restricting access – tourists, governments, or the local community?
- How can ethics be built into governance structures rather than left to individual good intentions?