Here are a few resources and essays I have come across, I thought they may be of interest out there to people.
I know Els already has kindly listed links to other information and resources, I thought this may be a good place to start of a kind of 'resource library'. If there are any other resource out there I would be interested to have a look.
The Politics of World Heritage: Negotiating Tourism and ConservationBy David Harrison, Michael Hitchcock, 2005http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xPcaVQzso58CThis collection of papers focuses on the contested nature of World Heritage at sites as diverse as The Netherlands, Ellis Island (USA), post-colonial Mesoamerica, Cambodia, Fiji, Kyrgyzstan, and Vietnam. In addition, eight research notes explore heritage interpretation in the USA, Lebanon, Peru, Indonesia, Singapore, Tasmania and India.
Preserving the heritage of humanity? Obtaining world heritage status and the impacts of listing.Aa, Bart J.M. van der 2005http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/rw/2005/b.j.m.van.der.aa/The 1972 UNESCO world heritage convention was established to better preserve the world's 'most outstanding' natural and cultural world heritage sites. This research tries to answer the question of whether or not the convention has been an effective tool to better preserve these heritage sites. Does the world heritage list include all the 'best' heritage sites? And does inscription raise the level of preservation? Or does tourism endanger the site after its selection on the list?
World Heritage as NIMBY? The Case of the Dutch part of the Wadden SeaBart J.M. van der Aa, Peter D. Groote and Paulus P.P. Huigen, 2002?http://www.multilingual-matters.net/cit/007/0291/cit0070291.pdfAcquiring the world heritage label, a reward for establishing and preserving an outstanding environment, is often assumed to be an honour for the local population and a useful leverage for the tourist and environmental organisations. However, the case of the Wadden Sea, a trilateral nomination by Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands, makes clear that this is not always true, and public consultation in The Netherlands has revealed that these local stakeholders do not support such a nomination. I seems they epitomise a 'Not in my back yard' (NIMBY) approach to World Heritage listing. This discussion paper examines the factors that complicate the nomination process. Contrary to common expectation, why do critical stakeholders, like the tourism industry, local inhabitants and environmental organisations become opponents? What are the interests at stake that subvert the balance of benefits and costs of the world heritage status to the extent that nomination is suspended? Is this phenomenon an exception, or an indication that obtaining the accolade is increasingly assessed from a rational rather than an emotional viewpoint, and that 30 years after the convention which created it the world heritage stamp has lost its uniqueness?