The cultural heritage of a nation or community is the legacy passed on through historic places, monuments, buildings, works of art, folklore, and knowledge. It is an intrinsic component of our identity and needs to be conserved, researched, understood, and shared in order to survive.
It is a heritage that can be found in a variety of forms and reflects a diversity of values such as the symbolic, historic, artistic, ethnological or anthropological, and scientific. It may be tangible (movable or immovable) or intangible, including the natural environment and landscape. It encompasses a wide range of cultural expressions: art, memorabilia and artifacts, archaeological sites, towns, museums, documents, books, and music. It also includes a group’s history of their values, traditions, achievements, and accomplishments, which is expressed in the way they live and interact with each other.
Cultural heritage is a bridge between the past and future, and can provide insights into human creativity and identity. It is best served by multidisciplinary approaches and methodologies integrating the social sciences, the humanities, and the environmental sciences. It is also important to understand the interconnectedness of culture, heritage, and sustainable development.
Historically, many countries were founded by people from diverse cultures who needed to find common ground in order to create a united national culture. The protection of cultural heritage was an important element of this process, as was the emergence of the concept of cultural property, which established that a work of art or a monument possessed a value common to all members of society that would be violated if it were destroyed or lost. This notion of cultural property led to the establishment of the UNESCO convention on the protection and conservation of cultural properties, and the concept of the World Heritage List.
Today, as we move towards a global village, the need for understanding and communication across cultural borders has become even more critical. For example, it is common for architects, artists and craftsmen to draw inspiration from other cultures even when they are far away in space or time. This can be seen in the use of Japanese prints by Paul Gauguin, and of African masks by Pablo Picasso. It is also reflected in the use of American neoclassical style by architects on Liberian plantations.
The emergence of the concept of heritage for sustainable development is an attempt to harness cultural heritage for a global agenda. This article focuses on three heritage for development projects funded through the ‘Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund’ and implemented by UNESCO in collaboration with other United Nations organisations and local partners in the Middle East and North Africa between 2008 and 2013. It explores how these projects used culture as an instrument for tackling global challenges, including poverty alleviation in marginalised groups (economic dimension), gender equality and empowerment of women (social dimension) and environmental sustainability (environmental dimension). This article offers a comparative analysis of the projects to highlight key achievements and common pitfalls.