Heritage & Tourism
- Minu Chawla
- Aug 21
- 2 min read
As UNESCO’s 46th session of the World Heritage Committee #WHC46COM concluded in Delhi, I reflected on the heritage-tourism conundrum that has occupied my thoughts for the past year and a half. This reflection started at the UNESCO Sub-regional conference in Bhopal last year, where I was one of the few tourism professionals among many heritage and conservation practitioners who often viewed tourism as detrimental. It was further fueled by the often-heard opinion from colleagues in infrastructure development that heritage is a deterrent to progress and development.
In reality, heritage conservation and tourism share a symbiotic relationship, more intertwined than practitioners from both fields often acknowledge. While heritage and conservation typically function as cost centers, tourism can turn these sectors into revenue or even profit generators. As tourism evolves and tourists seek novelty and diverse experiences, heritage becomes even more an indispensable part of the tourism landscape.
It was no surprise that I quietly committed to integrating heritage and conservation into my tourism development practice. I've been working on an exciting and challenging project for almost a year now. In the first phase, we developed a framework to select 4 destinations out of a pool of 40+ as candidates for tourism investment. I've often worked on projects where destinations were pre-selected for development, which can sometimes set the destination up for failure because basic sense-checks weren't performed. This project allowed me to be involved further upstream in the destination development process, and I ensured an objective approach. The client ratified our approach and deliverables, and engaged RoadsWellTraveled Advisory for the next phase of the project: an in-depth exploration of the selected destinations.
The recently concluded second phase saw RWT collaborate with a conservation architect to contribute to two tourism strategies. We used #ValuesBasedAssessment, a tool commonly employed in heritage and conservation, to provide objective justification for the destinations' profiles. To our knowledge, this was the first time this method was used in this context, and it was a significant learning experience for me. We also developed tourism infrastructure development guidelines—a handbook for future tourism-oriented infrastructure development in destinations with unique cultural identities. Our guidelines are not bound to a specific geography but rather a community with a strong cultural presence, emphasizing a heritage and conservation approach to ensure key values are preserved amidst future tourism growth.
I'm thrilled to be exploring new frontiers and advancing RoadsWellTraveled Advisory's advisory journey for sustainable and culturally respectful tourism development! I’d love to hear from my network about any innovative approaches you’ve employed in similar or related contexts.
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