Nan just shared this article with me : https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/unesco-weltkulturerbe-inflation-ld.1750860 (it's in German and behind a free login screen, both can be overcome).

It includes an interview with Christoph Brumann, a Swiss scholar, known for his work on cultural landscapes and this book on the WH convention.
It does outline (for a general audience) a number of issues that we already know about, but 2 things in particular stood out to me:
1. That there was an 'opposition group' of Sweden, Switzerland and Estonia against the BRICS-led distrust of the AB's that started in 2010. (it may have just been a group of WHC members at that year that stood their ground, like we have seen at other meetings with Norway recently for example)
2. Criticism of the high flow of German nominations coming in. It comes from a neighbour, and the article in this Swiss newspaper certainly portrays the Swiss as the good guys, but I wonder if such criticism exists in Germany itself as well.

Thanks for highlighting this! Indeed, many of the issues it highlights sound familiar to what we discuss here in your forum.

I find it slightly amusing that a Swiss scholar highlights Swiss moralising - having living in Switzerland for a few ages decades ago, there is a tendency to smugly look down on less principles nations there. What I notice about Switzerland and Sweden is that they seem to have no clear strategy on what to do with the WHL going forward, basically being satisfied with the amount of sites they currently have (CH 13, SE 15 sites). Switzerland currently only has 1 site on its TL (a quite obscure bridge); Sweden only has the "rise of systematic biology", which looks ill-fated after the failure of Darwin's lab. It's easy to be outraged about other countries being more cunning and organised when oneself is pretty non-committal about the whole process. Even allowing for a certain satisfaction with the number of sites they already have, I would think that more sites in CH and SE could be inscribed over the long term, and could therefore at least be identified for a TL. (And yes, I'm a proponent of having more sites overall, so I'm biased. Also giving Estonia some slack - it's a very small country, and it does have 3 sites on its TL - more than the other two combined!)

Germany is basically the opposite. Due to the way its federal structure works, cultural topics (including WH) are state topics, and the federal government only has a coordinating function (if at all). It basically leads to the same effect we see at the WH Committee, only on a smaller scale. Each state wants to have more sites, and so most states come up with new proposals each time they review the TL. A committee of all states (the Kultusministerkonferenz) decides which sites Germany should put on its TL, and the federal government (Germany's foreign ministry) just implements their decisions. The federal gov has no decision-making power in this process. In a similar vein, when Dresden was about to lose its WH status, the federal government couldn't do anything either. The state of Saxony was in charge of any decision related to the WH status, and it decided to ignore UNESCO.

I haven't come across discussions regarding Germany having to slow down its proposals - maybe there are articles out there, but I haven't seen any (I haven't really googled either, tbh). But even if there was such a discussion, the pressure from the public would need to be pretty high for the cultural ministers of the various states to slow down with nominating everything they can think of. I don't expect Germany to reduce the amount of nominations - as long as states have the money to write nomination dossiers and still find some ruin that hadn't been considered yet, they will steam ahead as they have done over the last decade.

Yeah, the fabulous Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK). In Germany's defense, I would point out that they retract if the expert feedback (icomos, iucn) is negative and do not leverage political pull to get even more below average sites inscribed. I think there are worse offenders on that level.


Issue I guess is that there is dedicated personnel (civil servants, consultants, ...) that need another task each year, so no way of slowing down.

I don't mind the approach of competing. Only risk is becoming a laughing stock if you continuously submit shitty sites.

Personally, the issue is not with Germany submitting sites for review, but with too many mediocre sites being inscribed (which is a decision of the WHC). Darmstadt comes to mind of a site that doesn't make the list better, that had a referral and was inscribed.


I would add the too early inscriptions as a key weakness. Essentially, we nowadays inscribe on pinky swears and with outstanding to dos. Not a poor country issue either. Bayreuth should not have been inscribed if they planned to immediately on inscription.

Perhaps an indication of a larger BRICS-led opposition with new members?

Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, Zambia

A possible flashpoint will be the World Heritage Committee decision regarding Russia's 2 nominations recommended for Deferral (Kazan Observatories and Gorokhovets). If a BRICS committee member proposes inscription we will know the fix is in.