Navigating Sustainable Tourism: Community Participation and Unesco World Heritage Projects in Greenland and Canada’s Maritime Spaces

The UNESCO World Heritage Site program promotes the vital role for local communities in meaningful engagement in cultural and natural heritage preservation as part of tourism development in maritime and coastal regions. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of practices of community engagement in proposed and established UNESCO World Heritage projects in Greenland and Newfoundland, Canada. We draw on fieldwork and interviews that were conducted as part of the project, “Towards a Socially Just Transition in the Arctic: Exploring, Theorizing and Disseminating Best Practice in Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement for Communities.” Our analysis highlights the challenges and disconnects in translating meaningful engagement in UNESCO-based coastal tourism development into meaningful engagement at the community level. Challenges include disconnects between communities and decision-makers; disconnects between local conversations and extra-local interests; and distributional concerns with the benefits and impacts of UNESCO-based coastal tourism development. At the same time, communities can strategically leverage their ties with UNESCO-based coastal tourism to help shape the social-ecological futures for maritime regions. We see how UNESCO connections are leveraged to resist other forms of development, such as undersea mining exploration and oil and gas development. While the UNESCO World Heritage program emphasizes the role of local participation and engagement in cultural and natural heritage preservation, our analysis of proposed and established coastal UNESCO World Heritage projects in Greenland and Newfoundland highlights the challenges, tensions, and opportunities involved in translating the promise of local participation into actual practices of meaningful engagement for maritime communities. As we demonstrate, more attention needs to be paid to how UNESCO World Heritage goals for local participation and engagement play out at the local level to better understand the challenges and opportunities related to translating broad global goals for sustainable coastal tourism into the contexts of maritime host communities.