Global Strategy for a Balanced, Representative and Credible World Heritage List (1994)

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Adopted by the World Heritage Committee in 1994 in explicit acknowledgement that the List was skewed — towards Europe and North America, towards monumental architecture over living and vernacular culture, and towards cultural over natural properties. Its aim was to broaden the range of what could qualify as heritage and to help under-represented States Parties nominate. Its results are contested: peer-reviewed analysis concludes the imbalance did not measurably decrease and may have widened, and that the persistence of the skew is itself a credibility problem for the Convention. The Strategy is the honest institutional admission that the List reflects the geography of capacity and diplomacy, not the geography of heritage.