Kalòs kai agathòs? government quality and cultural heritage in the regions of Europe

Abstract

This paper uses panel data on over 200 regions of Europe during the years 2010–2015 to study the relationship between the quality of institutions and the capacity of local authorities and stakeholders to effectively protect and support cultural heritage, using new designations in the UNESCO World Heritage List as a proxy. Besides analyzing the spatial distribution of World Heritage sites across European regions, we test whether the location of a region matters for the chances of obtaining a new UNESCO designation by controlling for the stock of World Heritage in the surrounding regions, and whether low regional government quality is an obstacle to inclusion of sites into the List. While we can detect no significant spill-overs from the stock of World Heritage in surrounding regions, we find evidence that local government quality matters for the chances of a region gaining a UNESCO site designation.

Entropy Change of Historical and Cultural Heritage in Traditional Tibetan Area of China Based on Spatial-Temporal Distribution Pattern

“…Through literature review, we can find that there has been more attention given to the large-scale patterns of historical and cultural heritage [10,11] and cultural heritage routes [12], while there has been less discussion on the distribution of historical and cultural heritage in special regional areas such as ethnic regions, high-altitude areas, and cross-basin areas. Although the geographical characteristics of the integrity [13], systematicity [14], regionality [15], and scalability [16] of historical and cultural heritage have been widely recognized, there has been relatively limited research on the complexity [17], temporality [18], and multiplicativity of historical and cultural heritage. Although some studies have discussed the potential threats and interferences faced by current historical and cultural heritage [19], the impact mechanisms of past geographic factors on the current distribution patterns of historical and cultural heritage still need further investigation and verification [20,21].…”

Lord, How I Want to Be in that Number! On the Blessing of UNESCO World Heritage Listing

“…Italy constitutes an ideal environment for analysing the impact of UNESCO designations because of the considerable number of World Heritage Sites and its decentralized structure of government, where regional and local governments play an active role in the process of application for heritage site recognition (Bertacchini and Revelli, 2021). As a result, it is a question of substantial policy relevance whether those efforts are worth their cost.…”