Edited by the late Francesco Francioni, a pioneering authority in international cultural heritage law, and by Federico Lenzerini, a leading scholar in the same field, this volume is the second edition of the commentary on the World Heritage Convention, originally published in 2008.Footnote ¹ The book is divided into two main parts, framed by an introduction and concluding remarks by the editors. The first part provides an article-by-article analysis of all thirty-seven provisions of the Convention. The second part includes six chapters examining the relationship between the Convention’s legal framework and other regimes of international law.

It would be reductive to describe this volume as merely a commentary on the World Heritage Convention. While it provides a detailed analysis of the most important and widely ratified instrument in its domain, the volume goes far beyond that, offering a broader perspective on international cultural and natural heritage law. In commenting on each provision, the authors incorporate an extensive range of references to other instruments as well as to institutions that complement or interact with the normative and institutional framework established by the Convention. Moreover, both the second part of the book and the individual article commentaries contain numerous reflections on the relationship between the Convention system and other areas of international law, including the rights of Indigenous peoples, the law of the sea, international human rights law, and international investment law. In this sense, the volume also serves as a valuable primer for readers seeking to engage with this area of public international law.

The chapters, written by different authors, provide diverse perspectives, enriching the volume while also resulting in some variation in methodology. This is evident, for instance, in the treatment of soft law. While some contributors take its relevance as self-evident, others emphasize that it remains, strictly speaking, soft law; for example, the 1972 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Protection, at National Level, of the Cultural and Natural Heritage is described as “only a soft law instrument” (11). Likewise, the degree of doctrinal analysis varies across chapters, depending in part on the specific provision under discussion. Yet even the less doctrinal contributions maintain a practical legal orientation. They provide descriptive accounts of the rules, often procedural in nature, and discuss practical challenges (for example, the limited transparency of the international assistance process regulated by the Convention; see p. 215) as well as existing gaps (such as whether the Convention applies to heritage sites located beyond state jurisdiction, including the high seas and deep seabed, in the absence of explicit treaty language; see p. 394). Ultimately, the commentary is conceived as “a guide to help administrators, judges, and operators in the cultural and environmental fields to interpret and apply the norms of the Convention” (6).

Nonetheless, the volume offers insightful perspectives not only for practitioners but also for scholars, including those less familiar with international cultural heritage law. Notably, the subject of the volume is a treaty regime generally regarded as a “remarkable success,” as contributors emphasize (423 and 247–50). To be sure, the field of international cultural heritage law is not devoid of its own disputes and tensions.Footnote ² Yet by virtue of its strong organizational element, the Convention’s framework is presented in the book as providing a structured platform through which conflicts can surface, be discussed, and be managed, conveying to the reader a rare measure of orderliness.

This partly derives from the Convention’s close connection with practice. That connection reflects what is perhaps its most distinctive feature: the emphasis it places on its own implementation process, centralized within the Convention’s institutional framework. Centralizing the implementation process within an international institutional system, rather than leaving it to domestic mechanisms, is rather unusual and, as the editors note in the conclusions (428), can pose certain issues. Be that as it may, as a consequence of this feature, the chapters of this volume are rich in references to concrete instances of implementation drawn from specific World Heritage site contexts. It is the practice of implementation— involving states, the World Heritage Committee and Centre, and various transnational actors—rather than the relatively scarce case law,Footnote ³ that provides much of the interpretative grounding for the commentary. Beyond references to specific instances, implementation practice is also reflected in the commentary through the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, Footnote ⁴ which are periodically updated by the World Heritage Committee and accompany the commentary on virtually all the articles.

This key characteristic—the active oversight of implementation by the Convention’s institutional system—ensures that new meanings emerging from practice are continuously incorporated into the Convention. This formalized, bottom-up process justifies describing the Convention as a “quintessential living treaty instrument” (65). Unsurprisingly, the volume is rich in references to the evolving interpretation and application of the Convention. A prime example is the authors’ engagement with the evolving meaning of “outstanding universal value,” which has increasingly been interpreted in a more pluralistic manner as a qualitative criterion for sites inscribed on the World Heritage List. More broadly, historical narratives feature prominently, some of which are particularly valuable in illustrating how the Convention emerged and developed through a combination of contingencies and fortuitous developments. For instance, Christina Cameron’s chapter provides an engaging account, full of anecdotes and parallel events, of the processes leading to the signing of the Convention.

Another hallmark of the Convention, closely linked to its implementation process, is its mechanism of international assistance. This extends beyond the simple channeling of financial resources to states parties. It also encompasses technical assistance and expert advice mobilized throughout the entire implementation cycle, including that relied upon by the committee and by the Centre in their own work. The chapters do not merely describe the procedures for international assistance as defined in the Convention and the Operational Guidelines. They provide concrete instances of how technical and scientific expertise, combined with legal considerations, contributes to shaping the application of the Convention. By way of example, the adoption of the Convention was preceded by a “Preliminary Study on the Legal and Technical Aspects of a Possible Instrument for the Protection of Monuments and Sites of Universal Value” (31, emphasis added); the criteria to define the concept of cultural heritage were discussed in a meeting the outcome of which “was largely the influence of a small group of individuals comprising 11 members from eight countries, with disciplinary backgrounds of archeology, landscape architecture, history and landscape ecology” (53); the “principal impetus in developing the conditions of integrity [a quality that natural heritage sites must possess] was scientific” as it was defined by “scientists concerned with designating a series of natural zones where the greatest numbers of geological, climatic, and biological characteristics would be preserved from all human endeavor destructive of ecological balance” (72). The international cooperation system envisaged by the Convention also encompasses scientific research, which is “needed for the effective implementation of the Convention” (160). The book will therefore be of great interest to those concerned with the role of expert knowledge in international law.

Furthermore, it becomes apparent from the book that the Convention evolves not only through its own implementation and through nonlegal, technical-scientific insights, but also through its interaction with other regimes of international law. Although not all possible interactions are addressed (for instance, trade law is only briefly discussed), the authors succeed in highlighting both frictions and effective, coordinated engagement between regimes. The chapter on the relationship between the Convention and other conventions regulating the protection of natural heritage makes this explicit, noting the “relationship of harmony and mutual support between these instruments” (348). Moreover, the book contains examples suggesting that inter-regime interactions often occur through practical, inter-institutional coordination, which can be more illuminating than abstract legal reasoning based on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, although such analyses are also included (114, 349, 415). For instance, Federico Lenzerini discusses the Biodiversity Liaison Group, comprising the heads of the secretariats of the five biodiversity-related conventions, as well as the agreements between the World Heritage Centre and several multilateral development banks, which “ensure greater complementarity and synergy” (268).

The Convention’s contact with other areas of international law is a consequence—neither natural nor automatic, but gradually and laboriously constructed, as the book shows in various chapters—of the very nature of what it regulates. Many World Heritage sites intertwine cultural and natural dimensions in ways that cannot be disentangled without artificiality, as Amy Strecker’s fascinating account of “landscapes”—sites shaped by both nature and human activity—illustrates. Furthermore, beyond their designation as World Heritage, whether cultural and/or natural, these sites cannot be understood in isolation from the social realities in which they are embedded. As the French geographer, sociologist, and philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) argued, not only is the “separation … between nature and knowledge and nature and culture … simply not valid” but, more generally, “functional,” instrumental spaces are fictitious.Footnote ⁵ Within any single site, multiple dimensions—its status as cultural and natural heritage, the presence of local communities, economic interests, and more—coexist, making its regulation an inherently complex process involving the interaction of various regimes of international law across the same space.

The foregoing discussion points to a reading of the volume that transcends the editors’ initial aim of producing a practitioner-oriented guide to practical challenges. From this broader perspective, the book emerges as a case study offering nuanced insights into how international law operates in practice and how its norms evolve through time, space, and legal as well as social interactions.