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  • Many Voices, One Vision: The Early Years of the World Heritage Convention by Christina Cameron, Mechtild Rössler
  • Claire E. Lobdell
Many Voices, One Vision: The Early Years of the World Heritage Convention. By Christina Cameron and Mechtild Rössler. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. 309pages. Hardcover, $149.95.

Many Voices, One Vision is an academic analysis of the international system that designates and monitors UNESCO World Heritage Sites. This analysis covers the years 1972, when the World Heritage Convention was ratified, to 2000, and focuses on the system itself. Individual World Heritage Sites are only mentioned briefly to illustrate major controversies or turning points. The authors, Cameron and Rössler, are both insiders to this system, having served in different parts of UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee. From 2006 to the present, the authors have conducted an ongoing oral history project whose narrators are key players in the World Heritage Convention system: members of States Parties (delegates that individual countries send to represent them at World Heritage Committee meetings), technical advisors from three international organizations [End Page 468] named as advisory bodies in the World Heritage Convention, and UNESCO staff. These narrators are quoted throughout the book, and an appendix lists each narrator along with a brief biography and description of his or her involvement in World Heritage. There is very little information, however, about the interviewers’ methodology. There are no lists of questions in the appendix, and while it appears from quotes and footnotes throughout the book that interviews were conducted in English and French, there is no indication of whether the services of translators or interpreters were used in the interview process. In the foreword, the authors note that they eventually plan to make the interviews from their World Heritage Oral Archives project available online at the University of Montreal and the UNESCO archives. As of this writing, the interviews are not yet online.

Several thematic threads run through this work. The World Heritage List includes natural sites, cultural sites, and mixed “cultural landscapes,” but there has been a tension throughout the years of the World Heritage Convention between the advocates and experts for natural sites and those for cultural sites, with many fewer natural sites proposed and inscribed each year than cultural sites. Similarly, in the years that this book focuses on, there was a consistent Euro-centricity to the World Heritage Committee, with European sites dominating the list and European and North American experts dominating proceedings. At various points during the twenty-eight years in question there were initiatives to diversify the list, although political pressures pushed in the opposite direction. Another theme is the attempts to define and create metrics for assessing intangible qualities such as “authenticity,” “uniqueness,” and “universal value.” The extent to which a particular site exemplifies these intangibles determines whether or not the site is inscribed on the World Heritage List, and yet different cultures view the concepts very differently. Still another theme or trend expounded upon throughout the book is the move, in the period 1972 to 2000, from a World Heritage Committee run by technocrats in the fields of conservation, art history, preservation, and architecture to a system that is heavily influenced by diplomats and political pressures. Along with this shift, there has also been a shift from more loose criteria for inscription to a more rigorous system of reviewing nominations and monitoring sites on the list.

Despite the authors’ oral history project, official published UNESCO documents and meeting minutes are cited more often than narrative quotes. It is not until the last chapter of the book, “Assessment of the World Heritage System: 1972–2000,” that the oral histories truly drive the text, with multiple narrators voicing their opinions on the strengths and shortfalls of the World Heritage System.

In the final analysis, Many Voices, One Vision is a narrow book. Cameron and Rössler’s focus on the diplomatic and administrative aspects of the world [End Page 469] heritage system means this work will primarily be of interest to scholars of international cooperation.

Claire E. Lobdell
Wood Memorial Library & Museum
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