Management effectiveness evaluation of world cultural landscape heritage: a case from China

Abstract World cultural landscape heritage (WCLH), recognized as a combination of cultural relics and natural landscapes with outstanding significance and universal value, is unique in terms of its differentiation from the deliberate human creativity of general cultural heritage and the “deartificialization” of natural heritage. To date, the management of WCLH has become increasingly standardized. However, with the prevalence of heritage resource development activities such as heritage tourism, the phenomenon of “urbanization”, “commercialization”, “artificialization” and other issues have gradually emerged in WCLH sites. Thus, the management issues of WCLH have become increasingly serious, leading to intense concerns about the unsustainable development of WCLH. Drawing inspirations from management effectiveness (ME) evaluation research of protected areas and acknowledging the uniqueness of WCLH, this study constructs a WCLH ME evaluation system consisting of four general criteria (management foundation, management system, management measures and management performance), 16 factors and 34 indicators. The evaluation system is applied and verified through an empirical study of five existing WCLH sites in China. The empirical results show that the ME of Chinese WCLH is at a “good” level. Specifically, the management of Chinese WCLH is overall impressive in indicators of management planning, heritage protection performance and economic performance but shows deficiency in indicators of protection fees, management infrastructure, management assessment, management institution, social performance, etc. Finally, this study discusses the management issues of respective heritage sites to provide suggestions and inspirations for the development, protection and management of the sites and other cultural landscapes in China and even the world.