Inger Birkeland – författare

This book examines multivocality in 21st-century World Heritage management through an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of the complexity and plurality of voices on the ground at a specific World Heritage site, offering new perspectives and insights into the established inherent tension between change and heritage conservation.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book presents a rich variety of cases grounded in a single World Heritage site, to provide new insights and perspectives on World Heritage as complex local phenomena entangled in global processes. Multivocality and constant change are fundamental to all societies, and must therefore be emphasised and also applied to World Heritage sites, including the UNESCO site under scrutiny in this volume: The Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Southern Norway. If World Heritage is to promote shared commitments to both conservation and principles of sustainability, the concept of conservation must acknowledge and accommodate change. Bringing together academic approaches from different disciplines, this edited volume addresses this pressing issue by paying serious attention to local complexities and multiple perspectives on the ground. The cases presented demonstrate the relevance of applying a broader sense of multivocality to improve practices in World Heritage management, policymaking, planning and governance. Multivocality emerges as a perspective attentive to diversity and complexity, questioning reductionism, and challenging monocultural thinking in global World Heritage management, while supporting a more democratic multitude of voices in World Heritage sites, both human and more-than-human.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the multidisciplinary field of heritage, heritage policymakers and bureaucrats, international advisory bodies to UNESCO, as well as managers at different levels in the World Heritage arena.

This book examines multivocality in 21st-century World Heritage management through an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of the complexity and plurality of voices on the ground at a specific World Heritage site, offering new perspectives and insights into the established inherent tension between change and heritage conservation.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book presents a rich variety of cases grounded in a single World Heritage site, to provide new insights and perspectives on World Heritage as complex local phenomena entangled in global processes. Multivocality and constant change are fundamental to all societies, and must therefore be emphasised and also applied to World Heritage sites, including the UNESCO site under scrutiny in this volume: The Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Southern Norway. If World Heritage is to promote shared commitments to both conservation and principles of sustainability, the concept of conservation must acknowledge and accommodate change. Bringing together academic approaches from different disciplines, this edited volume addresses this pressing issue by paying serious attention to local complexities and multiple perspectives on the ground. The cases presented demonstrate the relevance of applying a broader sense of multivocality to improve practices in World Heritage management, policymaking, planning and governance. Multivocality emerges as a perspective attentive to diversity and complexity, questioning reductionism, and challenging monocultural thinking in global World Heritage management, while supporting a more democratic multitude of voices in World Heritage sites, both human and more-than-human.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the multidisciplinary field of heritage, heritage policymakers and bureaucrats, international advisory bodies to UNESCO, as well as managers at different levels in the World Heritage arena.

As contemporary socio-ecological challenges such as climate change and biodiversity preservation have become more important, the three pillars concept has increasingly been used in planning and policy circles as a framework for analysis and action. However, the issue of how culture influences sustainability is still an underexplored theme. Understanding how culture can act as a resource to promote sustainability, rather than a barrier, is the key to the development of cultural sustainability.

This book explores the interfaces between nature and culture through the perspective of cultural sustainability. A cultural perspective on environmental sustainability enables a renewal of sustainability discourse and practices across rural and urban landscapes, natural and cultural systems, stressing heterogeneity and complexity. The book focuses on the nature-culture interface conceptualised as a place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledge meet, are negotiated, discussed and resolved. Rather than looking for lost unities, or an imaginary view of harmonious relationships between humans and nature based in the past, it explores cases of interfaces that are context-sensitive and which consciously convey the problems of scale and time.

While calling attention to a cultural or ‘culturalised’ view of the sustainability debate, this book questions the radical nature-culture dualism dominating positive modern thinking as well as its underlying view of nature as pre-given and independent from human life.