International cooperation

The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a widely coveted mark of distinction. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at Committee sessions, interviews and documentary study, the book links the change in operations of the World Heritage Committee with structural nation-centeredness, vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making, and loose heritage conceptions that have been inconsistently applied.

Land is the basis of human life. With climate change, the mass extinction of biological diversity and an often dysfunctional food system, we are experiencing three colliding global crises that are directly linked to the way we manage land. Yet the land and its biologically productive ecosystems are under more pressure than ever before.

In recent decades, partnerships and cooperative initiatives of state and non-state actors have been increasingly called upon by the United Nations to contribute transformative solutions to the challenges of sustainable development. Many of such initiatives strive to end hunger, mitigate climate change or build sustainable cities, and are most deeply connected to natural resources and land use to achieve their objectives.

During the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing environmental awareness and concern created unprecedented demand for ecological expertise and novel challenges for ecological advocacy groups such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This book reveals how, despite their vast scientific knowledge and their attempts to incorporate socially relevant themes, IUCN experts inevitably struggled to make global schemes for nature conservation a central concern for UNESCO, UNEP, and other intergovernmental organizations.