Cultural Heritage Law and Natural Cultural Paradigms Within the Sustainable Development Discourse

Since the 1968 s.-c. Bruntland Report, sustainable development has become increasingly important in the international agenda. After the controversial success of the Millennium Development Goals, their heirs—the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals—are beginning to show their potential. In such a scenario, the discourse over sustainability and sustainable development is attracting attention from the international community, as well as from states and stakeholders around the globe. Renewed global attention to nature (as a key element that needs to be protected per se) together with the worldwide emerging field of cultural heritage law as an autonomous field of law has helped shed light on the interdependence of humans and their environment, as well as on the links between cultural heritage and the natural environment. In such a framework, cultural heritage has gradually infiltrated the sustainable development discourse. The present work aims at analyzing the diverse facets of the relationship between culture and nature to draw attention to the links between cultural heritage and sustainable development.