Heritage Voices: Mechtild Rössler on World Heritage in the framework of the List

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: First, could you tell me about your personal experience? Why did you choose heritage as your academic and professional field?

Mechtild Rössler: I am a trained geographer with a background in cultural geography, and I have a PhD in natural sciences from the University of Hamburg. I have also worked extensively on the history of planning. In that regard, I was invited to join the museum in Paris, the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in La Villette, where I worked 1989–1990, and then I went to the University of California in Berkeley 1990–1991 for research in geography, focusing heavily on the history of planning.

I went to see the Sauer papers — Professor Karl Sauer was an influential geographer, especially for the relationship between human culture and the environment and founded in a way the cultural landscape concept. Then I went back to Paris and to the UNESCO library to look for a book on the history of the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme for a publication  with the French CNRS (later published as Géographes face au monde. L’Union Géographique Internationale et Les Congrès Internationaux de Géographie. Geographers and the World. The International Geographical Union and the International Geographical Congresses. Paris: Harmattan 1996.) I was supposed to go to Kassel University; I had a professorship there and my seminars on the history of nature protection were already announced.

Then I met a former fellow student from Freiburg at UNESCO who introduced me to Mr Bernd von Droste zu Hülshoff, who was Director of the MAB programme and the Division of Ecological Sciences at the time. He started to interview me, and I couldn’t help but laugh. He interviewed me first in German, then in English and French.

Of course, I had lived in the US and France. I asked him what this was about. He said, ‘Oh, Ms. Rössler, we are looking for a young German with a PhD, under 32 years old, because we have funding from the German authorities for a position like that.’ I said, ‘My seminars are advertised at Kassel University,’ and he said, ‘Just think about it and get back to me by the end of the week if you are interested.’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness! Coming back to Paris would be more than interesting.’ In the end, I decided to go back to Paris.

I signed a contract for two years. From those two years, I ended up working at UNESCO for 30 years because it was such an interesting time. I arrived on 1 November 1991.

1992 was the 20th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention. That was an exciting time. I closed my career with the preparations for the 50th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention, which was another exciting time. I came back to Poland for the 50th anniversary celebrations in 2022.  In 1992, Mr Bernd von Droste zu Hülshoff and the Director-General at the time, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, created the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, and I was the first member of staff because Mr von Droste took me on for the Centre. That’s how I ended up working with World Heritage.

However, given that my background was in both culture and natural heritage, I would say that it was one of the best decisions of my life, and Mr von Droste deserves credit for taking me on for that World Heritage adventure. Before 1992, World Heritage was divided administratively in UNESCO into the Division of Ecological Sciences and the Cultural Heritage Division. It was only on the occasion of the 20th anniversary that the two parts of the Secretariat came together. This was a really interesting and indeed a very good move by UNESCO, because it is one single Convention.

However, it is mostly viewed by the world as a cultural convention, which it is not. It is also one of the eight biodiversity conventions. Of course, my PhD in Natural Sciences was very useful in this regard.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: How has the World Heritage Centre developed? Do you have any behind-the-scenes stories? What challenges did you face?

Mechtild Rössler: First of all, there was a challenge within UNESCO because Mr von Droste had to keep the creation a secret until it was completed. There were people in the cultural sector and in sciences who were not very pleased because the Convention was one of UNESCO’s key legal instruments. He said to me, ‘Mechtild, you have to write this document with me,’ and this was for the creation of the centre.

I was not allowed to tell anyone what was happening. During the day, I would disappear into another office at UNESCO and he would come with new texts. It was one of the most exciting periods because it involved raising the profile of World Heritage to mark the 20th anniversary. This also involved organising two major meetings in UNESCO in Paris and in Washington DC on the development of the future of World Heritage.

Then there was the World Heritage Committee in December 1992. We held a preparatory meeting for the World Heritage Committee in Washington, D.C., which was also an opportunity to develop strategic orientations that were adopted by the entire World Heritage Committee in December 1992. This was the first step in making World Heritage more relevant, and involved looking at the monitoring process, the nomination process, capacity building, and promotion. This was Mr von Droste’s idea, as he wanted to make World Heritage a truly international legal instrument. And that happened.

Many more countries ratified it. Today, in 2025, we have 196 countries. That’s more than the 193 countries that UNESCO has.

It is one of the most amazing stories that I was privileged to witness from 1992 until the 50th anniversary in 2022. I think you can see the evolution very clearly if you look at the decade. After all, 1992 saw the World Heritage Committee in Santa Fe (USA). We had a wonderful evening with all the site managers from the United States and many more besides. I have to say that we were mostly experts in the room. I was an expert myself, of course.

People from UNESCO are hired for their expertise. But I also have to say that we shared the same vision. This is what we wrote in the book on the early history of the World Heritage Convention with my co-author, Professor Christina Cameron, who has even chaired the World Heritage Committee twice. It was interesting, as we had two different perspectives: I represented the Secretariat, while she represented the Canadian State Party and worked on the World Heritage programme there. Until 2008, she led the Canadian World Heritage Delegation to the Committee.

After retiring, she became a researcher. We wrote this book with me, which was first published in 2013. It is now available in four languages, including French, Chinese and Russian. We are now writing a new book on the more recent history of the Convention. I think it is very interesting to look at the evolution of the Convention. You see, in 1992 it had not yet been ratified or signed by all the countries. We’re almost there. For the 50th anniversary, 196 countries were represented. Now, we have more than 1,200 sites.

At the time, that figure was much lower. This is one of the issues that could destroy the Convention. It’s much more politicised now. Back then, the experts in the room would go out for dinner together and discuss notions such as authenticity and integrity, how to improve monitoring and reporting, and what to do about growing tourism. Nowadays, you can count the experts speaking in the room on one hand. They don’t have the right to speak because it’s always the ambassador or a senior member of the national authorities. It’s no longer the experts, they just write some texts for the ambassadors to read; there is no longer any real exchange.

I personally think this is a very negative development for the World Heritage Convention. The Convention states, that countries should nominate experts.

I think there have been a number of turning points. The debates on Jerusalem were certainly one turning point. Another was when Palestine became a member of the World Heritage Convention and ratified  it in December 2011. At the same time, they also became a member state of UNESCO. This led to a lot of discussions about financing and in a way to increased politicisation.

The United States left UNESCO, which meant that UNESCO had much less funding. It was terrible to witness this first-hand, as the number of staff at the World Heritage Centre was reduced from 42 to 27. This was despite a growing World Heritage List and increasing demands by all States.

Every country said that a mission needed to be sent to the site XYZ. ‘You have to do this,’ they said. ‘You have to prepare that document.’ ‘We’ll hold open-ended working groups,’ they said. ‘We’ll hold an extraordinary session of the Committee.’ But how would all of that be paid for? This was a significant challenge, especially due to the number of nominations that did not go through the standard nomination process, but rather through emergency procedures, which of course are understandable in real emergency cases.

However, this resulted in votes for example for each of the sites nominated by Palestine. I think that was too bad, because Bethlehem, for example, which was inscribed in 2012, is a site that really needs to be shared by all of humanity. Why inscribe it by a vote? This was really unnecessary. I was very sad about that. This continued to happen in subsequent years, including at the session in Kraków in 2017.

By that time, I was already the director of the World Heritage Centre, a position I held from 2015 until the end of 2021. It was a real pleasure to be director, but there were growing challenges, such as fundraising around 28 million USD per year and ensuring that staff worked on projects instead of statutory tasks, as requested by the World Heritage Committee. As the French would say, it was a casse-tête, a headache!

You had to fight for funding all the time. It didn’t help that many more sites were inscribed. While one can understand that countries want to have more heritage sites, it seemed like a race against the clock.

I asked many countries what the urgency was in bringing forward this or that nomination. Why don’t you sit down, prepare a proper management plan and consult with the local communities before going to the World Heritage Committee? ‘No, no,’ the mayor told me or the Delegation would say ‘He wants it during his mandate.’ I replied that this had nothing to do with the World Heritage Convention. I was utterly shocked by many of these debates, and the statistics proved me right. In many cases, it was really a political agenda instead of safeguarding the heritage of humanity.

Many countries also wanted to join the World Heritage Committee. There was also a race for the Committee seats to get their sites inscribed. That is not the purpose of being on the World Heritage Committee. The purpose is to inscribe sites of true outstanding universal value, not n’importe quoi, as the French would say. This is simply not possible. You really need to prove the outstanding universal value of these places. There were times, when sites were inscribed that were not recommended by the Advisory Bodies at all. In a few cases ICOMOS did not recommend a site, or IUCN also rejected them, but natural sites were fewer in number.

You might ask why. It’s more difficult to identify outstanding universal value in cultural heritage because every culture is unique. The second reason is that, unfortunately, comparative analyses and studies were not carried out, when a certain type of site was first nominated for the World Heritage List.

I often told ICOMOS colleagues in particular that this needs to be done. There were some major debates in the World Heritage Committee. For example, I noticed that there was one nomination after another of vineyard landscapes from Europe. I pulled the brakes and organized a meeting on vineyard sites in Hungary. We discussed the need for other parts of the world to be represented, such as New Zealand, Chile, Argentina and South Africa. Even today, in 2025, we still don’t have a site outside Europe for this type of property. After years  ICOMOS conducted a study and came to the same conclusions. The study is available, but those countries have not yet nominated a site of this type. South Africa, for example, has prioritised sites that illustrate its history, such as Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned, or the liberation sites and routes.

I understand that. But I really think that, when it comes to sites outside of Europe, other types of sites should be also considered. There was a discussion at the Committee after the last Gothic Cathedral, the 19th, was inscribed. Was this necessary? No, because you could have created one single site comprising 19 components from different European countries. We should have done that. But when I asked some of the countries, they said, ‘Oh, Mechtild, this is too complicated.’ We want our own site, and so on. So national interests were always behind every single nomination.

In France, for example, it was the President who took the final decision, which nomination would go forward to UNESCO; The decision-making process became more high-level and less expert-driven, for example with regard to making proper tentative lists. Proper tentative lists require you to get together at the national level and not just choose a site from each region or land, as in federal states as Germany, but to have a substantive and content-driven discussion. What is missing from the World Heritage List? What can we offer? What story really presents outstanding universal value to other cultures and regions of the world? These questions were hardly ever asked.

In a few cases, perhaps. I remember Mexico and Canada were doing this analysis. In many other countries, it was a wish list compiled by mayors and regions. We don’t have one, so we need one. But that’s not an argument at all. That’s one critical point I’m raising regarding ‘populating the World Heritage List’, as we call it in the book.

The other point is that, in my personal view, the Global Strategy was not well understood. In my view, this represented an anthropological shift in the World Heritage Convention. I attended the expert meeting on the global strategy and, if you look at the text, you will see that it considers people in relation to the land. This is also covered by the cultural landscape categories, on which I had the pleasure of working in 1992 and which were adopted by the Committee that year.

This covered the relationship between people and the environment and nature, which was very difficult to bring forward beforehand. The Committee discussed the landscape concept for 15 years without reaching a solution, but we did so in 1992. The other part of the global strategy covered people in society.

And we asked with the global strategy, why are there so many Christian monuments and so few monuments of other religions in this world? Why are there so few sites that cover the history of people in relation to society? That was the second point of the global strategy.

The third point was that we need to strike a balance between the regions of the world and the types of heritage. We then examined thematic programmes from the World Heritage Centre, focusing on forests and marine sites, cities or prehistory. This is a beautiful story because we had for example, the HEADS programme and held a number of workshops around the world with my colleagues. Now, in 2025, many prehistoric sites have been nominated and inscribed on the World Heritage List.

This is the result of the expert’s work, including the addition of a site that was definitely missing: the Megalith Alignment in Carnac, Brittany, France. It was fascinating for me to see this site come forward, as I had always thought it was absent from the list. Sometimes it takes 20 years. I’ve seen sites that took 25 years to be brought forward for the World Heritage List, but that’s not lost time.

On the contrary, they are deeply rooted in community involvement in the World Heritage nomination process and the preparation of management plans. Despite funding dwindling, they made visits to the centre. I think it’s worth taking the time to bring forward sound nominations.

These inscriptions went back to the World Heritage Committee after years. My last session as Secretary of the Convention was the Committee meeting in Fuzhou in China in 2021. It was a very difficult time because my team from the Centre was in UNESCO in Paris and I was in China with the chairperson. And it was fully online.

It’s always better if people meet in person, but there was no other possibility. I have to say that the World Heritage Committee became much more politicised. You can see that also in the Committee in 2025, they had debates about the wording of documents, such as the authenticity document from the Nairobi meeting. They debated for hours about whether to ‘endorse’ or to ‘adopt’ it. The Meiji sites in Japan inscribed in 2015, after long diplomatic efforts, led to much irritation and conflicts between Korea and Japan since then and in the World Heritage Committee, again in 2025.

We are also getting more and more memory sites. Personally, I had a different opinion. I don’t believe memory sites should have such a significant presence on the World Heritage List. I recognise that there are three sites from the early days of the World Heritage Convention, and rightly so: Auschwitz represents all Holocaust sites. We held many meetings with Poland and the people involved in presenting the site. I was there more than ten times, and I was in the expert group working in Auschwitz. Other sites with their place on the World Heritage list include Robben Island, South Africa for the history of apartheid, the Ile de Gorée in Senegal for the history of slavery, and Hiroshima for the history of the atomic bomb. However, recently, we have been getting sites, where the ‘safeguards’, which were always emphasised in the expert meetings and by the state party open-ended working group, have not been implemented. These safeguards have not yet been incorporated into the Operational Guidelines. Memory is fading. People don’t remember what the expert group said, which was adopted by the Committee.

I think this is unacceptable, because it results in a huge number of meetings where the secretariat has to solve issues that should have been solved by the States and by the Committee prior to the listing. It is not the secretariat’s job to solve major political issues that were already known at the time of inscription and could have been resolved beforehand. This is a strong view of mine, which I always expressed, when I was director.

The Committee has decided otherwise, but then they need to have the courage to solve those issues before the site is inscribed. They need to state that this issue has been solved and put it in the decision. Now, we have sites, for which I can predict major problems.

Unfortunately, there are more and more disputes between countries. In my opinion, there are other very good programmes, such as the Memory of the World Programme, which has experienced similar discussions. They are trying to solve these disputes and have made quite a lot of progress in this regard. This programme could be used for sites where the value does not lie in the physical aspect. I personally believe it may lie in the documents and records. I think it’s a very difficult issue for the World Heritage Committee, the secretariat and the country itself if the conflict resumes. One of the points we raised at the expert meeting is that at least 100 years should elapse between the original conflict and the site being added to the World Heritage List. Then you have historians who can judge.

By the way, this also applies to other types of heritage sites. I remember a meeting in Helsinki about modern architecture, which came up with a fundamental rule. You need to have 25 years between the construction of the building and inscription, because you never know — maybe future generations will judge differently. Personally, I thought it was a good idea.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: Thank you very much for sharing with me the challenges and difficult issues surrounding the inscription of World Heritage sites. Do you think there is any solution to the politization of the inscription process?

Mechtild Rössler: I think there are four points. Firstly, there has been an evolution in the nomination process, with a preliminary assessment now informing the state party very clearly as to whether or not it has outstanding universal value. This is a step in the right direction.

Secondly, I think all states parties should create proper tentative lists and have this discussion beforehand. What is really worthy of being added to the World Heritage List?

Thirdly, there is a proposal that has been discussed many times but never implemented: that a member of the World Heritage Committee should never nominate a site during their four-year term of office. This has been suggested many times, and I remember a debate about it in 2012, but then Japan said it was against the convention because they have the right to nominate. Of course you have the right to nominate, but who says it has to be discussed during your term? That is a decision for the World Heritage Committee.

Fourthly, I think the operational guidelines simply need to be applied, because countries that are already well represented on the World Heritage List have the option to space out their future nominations, as set out in the guidelines. This is one of the points of the global strategy, and those countries that are well represented should voluntarily reconsider when they submit their next nomination. This would at least stop the race, which currently involves several European countries, including the UK, Spain, France, Germany and Italy, as well as India and China, among others. I think this is something the committee needs to emphasise each time.

Another point for me is funding. The convention was not created just to make a paper list. It has been essentially devised for conservation, which is the ultimate goal of the committee, the secretariat and all states parties.

If we are unable to protect those sites and pass them on to future generations, it will be a failure of the convention and of all 196 states, because they have not done enough to preserve the sites. One issue is that there are too many sites nominated for the World Heritage List, and there is little funding available. So why would you consider adding more sites, when we cannot even maintain and enhance the preservation of those existing sites? I think this is the crux of the matter. In my view, the committee could stop accepting nominations, except perhaps from countries with no sites, and focus solely on the state of conservation, but they are not able to do so. Of the 250 properties examined in terms of state of conservation, an insignificant percentage come from nominations with issues or have decisions that are weakened in terms of conservation, so there is really no point.

The Committee spends most of its time on nominations and on some of the other issues, such as the budget, for which they need to create a budget group each time because the budget is insufficient. Each year, they say the same thing. More funding is needed, but the problem remains. I have seen countries or local authorities and communities that spend 5 or 10 million dollars on nominations, but they don’t allocate any of that money to conservation. This is terrible, and the sites will continue to deteriorate unless the committee intervenes. I can be very direct now because I am no longer the director.

I returned to my original love of research, and as I also research the political history World Heritage from 2000 to 2015, I can see things very clearly.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: You mentioned the countries that are not represented on the list or have very little representation. Does the centre have any incentives to encourage those countries to consider nominating something for the list?

Mechtild Rössler: Of course, there are many incentives for those in developing countries, such as funding from the World Heritage Fund to prepare a nomination or a proper tentative list. However, not every country needs to have a site. Monaco was my dream country for many years. At the time, I worked with Prince Albert and the Monaco Foundation, and he provided funding for World Heritage projects in the Arctic and the oceans, which was fantastic. They wanted to support World Heritage without having as site!

He fully understood how the World Heritage Convention works, and Monaco didn’t need a site. They nominated an area with France, which didn’t make it onto the World Heritage List, but they didn’t fight it, and rightly so. So, the clear message is that not every country needs a World Heritage site if it has none of outstanding universal value. However, those countries which have recently ratified the convention should discuss this with the World Heritage Centre and UNESCO is really ready to assist.

There is funding available through the World Heritage Fund, as well as a priority for example for SIDS (small island developing states) and through specific project funds which UNESCO obtains. There are also other possibilities, , other mechanisms, which is a very important point. We now have the African World Heritage Fund (AWHF) and we previously had the Bahrain ARC-WH, which unfortunately closed, but a new one for the Arab region is hopefully coming soon.

Different possibilities exist, and what is even more important is training and capacity building. Since the beginning of the implementation of the Convention in 1975, training has been one of the most important aspects, as I have seen in my travels around the world. I have seen that capacity building is important for site managers and people working in institutions. Going through a full cycle of a nomination, rather than just being trained and then moving to another ministry, really gives stability to the World Heritage Convention, as I have said many times.

I was on the board of the African World Heritage Fund and the other category two centres (C2C), and I think they have a role to play. Another point is that training should be carried out more often. When a wealthy country prepares a nomination, it is worthwhile for them to work with a country that lacks the funds to prepare a nomination dossier. Unfortunately, this kind of training and twinning has only happened a few times, but I think it is something that we should promote more often because it benefits both the developed and developing countries. The developed countries can see the real problems on the ground and understand why the developing countries cannot prepare a nomination so quickly. They lack the capacity and the personnel in the ministry to help, and sometimes they don’t even have the paper to print the nomination or send it to Paris.

I’ve seen this many times before, and I’ve asked for comparative studies. For example, if you take industrial heritage, which is now more represented on the World Heritage List than it was at the beginning, and you compare sites in Europe and Africa, I remember when the iron sites in Burkina Faso were nominated. I was there when they were on the tentative list, and I thought, ‘My goodness, they really need help searching for information on the history of iron production and making comparisons with other countries.’ You could get university researchers involved, for example. The other day, I gave a keynote speech at the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) on cultural landscapes. Many students approached me after the speech, as they are working on topics that are relevant to World Heritage nominations. They are looking forward to receiving help with their dissertations and master’s theses, and I think we should encourage this much more than we do at the moment. We need to link universities much more with sites and national institutions.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: Do you have a personal favourite that you feel truly represents outstanding universal value and that you would like to see nominated one day?

Mechtild Rössler: There were many sites that I thought truly represented outstanding universal value, but some of them cannot be nominated for political reasons. Some countries don’t currently prioritise it, but it may happen in the future. I mentioned the vineyard sites in other parts of the world because they wanted to nominate other types of heritage. For some of them, it happened when we introduced cultural landscapes. We thought we needed to include agricultural heritage on the World Heritage List, so I organised a meeting on rice terraces, for example. As a result, we now have the Philippine rice terraces, which are called ‘stairways to heaven’.

They are breathtaking sites that you cannot imagine, unless you have seen them. I was very pleased to see them on the World Heritage List, as well as other types of heritage and movements of people. In the Global Strategy of 1994, we said that transhumance areas would be inscribed on the World Heritage List, and it has recently been inscribed in Azerbaijan. There are also exchanges with other conventions, for example regarding dry stone walls. Dry stone walling is a practice recognised by the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, and we have many drystone walls in World Heritage sites. I have worked extensively on pastoralism, for example in the Cévennes and Albania, and we have published the results, but they were not implemented in Southeastern Europe or North Africa. I think there is great potential, but national agendas differ, so I would always invite an international expert to review a national tentative list, as they have a different perspective. I was invited to discuss the Portuguese tentative list in the Azores, which at the time only had one site on the World Heritage list, a city. We have many cities on the World Heritage list, so there is no need for more, but they asked ‘Ms. Rössler, what do you think is missing?’ They showed me geological sites, old volcanoes, etc. I said that they needed to do a comparative analysis to see how these sites compared to others, but it’s very difficult to compare geological sites because geology, and especially volcanism, is unique to a specific area.

Then I was overflying the Azores — I went to five out of the seven islands — and when I was over Pico Island, I looked out of the window. As a geographer, I can read the land, and I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ There were walls all over the area. We landed, and I said, ‘Please show me. I need to see that. What is it?’ They said, ‘Oh, Mechtild. These are our walls for  our vineyards. All these walls together go three times around the earth.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I have never seen that. I know the vineyard sites in Lanzarote, where they are in little craters with a stone wall around them.’ I’ve never seen anything like this. I asked them if they were aware of how unique it was, and they said no, they had no idea. They also had no idea what a cultural landscape was. Then the site was nominated as a mixed site, and they included everything they had on the island in the nomination dossier. Of course, the unique forest of Laurisilva was significantly reduced, so it didn’t make sense from a natural site and integrity perspective. Then it was referred back by the Committee, and they came up with the Pico vineyard site. Imagine, they delivered wine to the Tsar in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 16th century, and they delivered all over Europe. It’s unbelievable, and they had no idea that their cultural landscape and wine production site was unique. So, that site is now on the World Heritage List.

Whenever I was on a mission, I encouraged people to think differently and apply the global strategy, considering the relationship between people and the land, and between people and society. I think that was a success. Another success story from recent years came from a very sad story. At its session in Helsinki, the committee refused expert advice from indigenous peoples. They created a group to advise the committee, but this was not accepted at the time. Nowadays, we have an indigenous peoples group that advises on and looks at World Heritage sites, and many of them are happy that their sites have been recognised for their cultural significance or sacred values.

This was a beautiful story in 1993 with Tongariro, the sacred mountain of the Māori people in New Zealand, and in 1994 with Uluru-Kata Tjuta, the site of the Anangu in Australia. People always ask, ‘But Mechtild, these were natural sites before; now they are mixed. Does that change anything?’ I answered, ‘It changed everything. It changed the management of the site. Now we have co-management. It changed the situation for Uluru-Kata Tjuta. They created a cultural centre where they can tell visitors about their own stories and their sacred sites.’ It changes the experience for you, the visitor and for them.

I think the whole management has changed, and I’m very happy about these success stories. So, looking back at the last 50 years of the World Heritage List, it’s not all bad, but we can still make improvements if countries take the Convention and the Operational Guidelines seriously, and if the Committee implements its own recommendations, such as those relating to memory sites, in the Operational Guidelines.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: Which session did you find most memorable?

Mechtild Rössler: I remember all of them. I remember the room because I sat through the committee from 1992 to 2021, meaning I was on the podium for the committee sessions. For the last six years, I was on the podium the whole time. I wasn’t allowed to leave the podium, which was difficult for various reasons. I remember every single discussion, which is quite unique, I have to say. The same is true for Professor Cameron, who sat through that as well. This is why our research is different from that of other researchers: we also remember each of the discussions.

I nearly cried in 1992 when, after three months of our work on the landscape categories, the committee adopted them. That was fantastic, but it was a coincidence that the Rio conference happened in the same year. Countries were therefore prepared to look at biodiversity and culture differently and immediately accepted the cultural landscape concept.

Another memorable moment was in 1993 in Colombia, when the United States welcomed the danger listing of the Everglades. This happens very rarely. It also happened with Colombia and Los Katios National Park because they knew they needed to solve the political issues and make the park accessible again. They accepted the danger listing and did everything to get the site removed from the danger list, which happened in 2014. The head of the Colombian National Parks, Julia Miranda, was there, and it was very moving.

Then, of course, there have been many listings and removals from the danger list. The Galapagos Islands were on the danger list and were removed. The other thing is the delisting. This is a terrible situation for anyone in the secretariat, the committee, or any of the state parties, because it means we all failed. The first one happened in 2007, and it was a memorable session in New Zealand because of the delisting of the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary. This first site delisted was from Oman because of oil and gas exploration.

Then, in 2009, the worst situation ever happened to me when the first cultural site was removed, which was in my own country, the Dresden Elbe Valley. The mayor and local authorities — not the national authorities — had a different view. They didn’t want to engage with the World Heritage Committee; they just wanted to build their bridge. They weren’t even able to make any concessions or compromise. They came to the World Heritage Centre several times, and at the time, Mr Bandarin was the director. Each time, they said ‘no’ to every request from the committee. The committee was really upset, and the site was delisted after a mission, which confirmed that the outstanding universal value was lost. I was called to the German parliament and court, where I was faced with 16 lawyers. Nowadays, there are hundreds of books on the subject. Articles are written not by heritage specialists, but by lawyers, because it was a clash between decision based on local law in a democratic country, and international law, in the form of the World Heritage Convention. Whatever decision was made, it would have been wrong, so that was terrible.

Then, during the last session, I was running as secretary of the Convention, we had the case of Liverpool in the UK. Again, it was a site where, in my personal view, the delineation of the World Heritage area was wrong from the beginning. This happened in a number of cities, I have to say, and they did development projects and didn’t follow through any of the recommendations. Again, there was dialogue, but it didn’t lead to results for the World Heritage Committee. It was a secret vote by the 21 Committee members to delist the site, and I think the UK and the mayor had expected otherwise. Even I was very surprised that the Committee took such a strong stand.

My last session was memorable for a number of reasons, also because the first Jewish site from Germany was inscribed, including from my hometown. That was interesting: the ShUM cities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz — three different components in a serial site.

Katarzyna Jagodzińska: Thank you so much for the interview. Hopefully, things will evolve in the future to be more heritage-oriented and less politically oriented.

Teams, 16 September 2025