Re-thinking relationships : World Heritage, communities and tourism

![CDATA[Many consider the relationship between World Heritage sites and tourism fraught. Tourtellot (2007) in World Heritage wrote that tourism is the 'biggest threat and benefactor' of World Heritage sites. The 'threat' is not confined to the heritage resource itself, but extends to those communities organically connected to World Heritage sites, with the desire for economic wellbeing jostling amongst a host of other values (Staiff2010). Tourism research literature has long been attempting to understand the impacts of tourism on physical, cultural, social and economic environments of destination communities. Staiff and Ongkhluap (forthcoming) evocatively recall the work of Robert Wood (1993) noting, '[he] wrote memorably of the governing metaphor dominating the research scenario: as though tourism and a destination community were billiard balls, each a discrete entity - tourism, the white ball hurtling towards a stationary coloured ball', the destination then 'suffering' the impacts of this external force. The reality is somewhat different and far more complex. Destinations and local communities are not merely passive in the process. 'Tourism', 'community' and 'heritage' are not neat entities. Each is impossible to define, let alone assuming any consensus about defining characteristics, perspectives, behaviours or agency. Rather, each term is a reductive abstraction of what is very messy, porous, relational, contested and in motion (see, for example, Smith 2006; Winter 2007; Waterton and Watson 2010a, 2010b). Anticipated and cited benefits of tourism in heritage places include the creation of local employment and enhanced conservation, the perceived negatives include hastened socio-cultural changes and degradation of the heritage resources. As Tourtellot suggests, desirable and undesirable outcomes can be attributed to increased visitor numbers and are amplified by World Heritage status (Teo et al. 2001; Dearborn and Stallmeyer 2010). This chapter re-examines these tensions blurring the 'global' and 'local' and acknowledging the inconvenient messiness of numerous converging forces with conflicting values percolating through the heritage 'system' and 'community', along with ongoing restructuring of spatial governances. It also gestures towards our ambivalence about conservation and development being 'balanced', looking instead to unsettle this oft-used binary and attempting to move beyond the associated expectations this precarious language creates, instead seeing conservation and development as entangled processes within living places with (plural) heritages.]]