The Faustian Pact

This chapter unpacks the concept of the Faustian pact between protection and prestige in the World Heritage regime. It demonstrates how the politicisation thesis reproduces a functionalist understanding of the World Heritage based around conservation—a ‘conservation communion’—and draws on broader analyses of UNESCO politicisation to complicate this depiction. To do so, it returns to the origins of the Convention to show how protection became tethered to prestige out of a concern about the viability of the concept and the need to motivate the involvement of states that could best make a contribution to conservation. The central concept of Outstanding Universal Value came to exemplify this bargain by seeking to bring ‘protection and management’ into a register of value. The chapter then traces how the pact remains a prominent part of the logic of the World Heritage regime, including for technical specialists. By evoking Faust, the chapter suggests we may also see a Faustian arc, although by drawing on the divergent endings of different versions of the tale, it suggests the ambivalent potential for its denouement. Finally, it unpacks each of the components of the Faustian dyad of protection and prestige.