From Dualism to Interlinkage: How World Heritage Reform Supports Integrated Management of Natural World Heritage

Objective This paper examines how recent reform within the UNESCO World Heritage Convention help rethink the management approach for natural World Heritage in response to longstanding critiques of the nature-culture dualism. While the Convention was pioneering in safeguarding both cultural and natural heritage within a single international instrument, its implementation has largely maintained a separation between culture and nature, favouring a management that allows one to dominate the other as opposed to the interlinkage of natural and cultural heritage. Focusing on natural World Heritage, the paper analyses how recent reform facilitates a more integrated, culture-inclusive management paradigm. Methods/process Drawing on a qualitative, interpretive document analysis of Convention texts, Operational Guidelines and guidance tools, and informed by the author’s institutional insider perspective, the paper situates recent reform within broader scholarship on relational approaches to heritage, including the concepts of natureculture and biocultural diversity. These perspectives challenge the modernist separation of nature and culture and provide a theoretical foundation for rethinking heritage management as relational and integrated. The paper reviews early reform through the introduction of cultural landscapes and mixed sites, highlighting both their contributions and limitations, before turning to recent reform that has not yet been comprehensively analysed from a management perspective. This includes the introduction of the Preliminary Assessment process as a mandatory first step in the World Heritage nomination cycle, revised Tentative List guidance, the Enhancing Our Heritage Toolkit 2.0, and the adoption of IUCN’s World Heritage Strategy, which explicitly recognises culture as a strategic priority for management of natural World Heritage. Results/conclusion The paper argues that, while the formal nature-culture dualism persists in the Convention, its practical implications for management are being incrementally dissolved through recent reform. By demonstrating how management tools, procedures and institutional strategies now enable earlier, more balanced recognition of cultural and natural values, the paper emphasises that a culture-inclusive management paradigm for natural World Heritage is emerging.