Brokering Between Prestige and Protection

This chapter shows how experts act as brokers between prestige and protection. Whereas scholarly research framed around politicisation and crisis has detected a waning in experts’ influence in their frontstage World Heritage presence, it follows experts into the backstage negotiation between conservation commitments oriented around protection and management of sites, and states’ desire for generating and maintaining prestige. Firstly, the chapter demonstrates how an overall commitment to protection orients technical specialists’ worldview and structures their practices. Sincere and deeply felt, this commitment drives both hope and disappointment, perseverance and disenchantment. Understanding this commitment enables us to see what motivates some technical specialists to engage in a form of brokering. We learn how heritage experts negotiate outcomes through tactical proffering or withholding of their knowledge or recommendations—their power of ‘consecration’ used to burnish World Heritage prestige—in exchange for conservation commitments. Yet we also see how other, non-expert, participants seek to cut out technical specialists as the ‘middle man’, while retaining the symbolic function of their expertise. This forces us to rethink the agency of experts and understand yet another face of the Faustian pact.