International Law Association Lisbon Conference 2022: Participation in Global Cultural Heritage Governance

This Committee, established in 2017, started its work at the ILA’s Seventy-Eighth Conference in Sydney. The Committee’s mandate addresses the pressing challenge in the field of international heritage law stemming from its sectoral fragmentation and specialization. Indeed, international cultural heritage law suffers from a problem of operating as a series of almost ‘self-contained’ regimes, without meaningful engagement with other instruments in this domain, not to mention non-heritage instruments. Part of this isolation stems from the lack of engagement of actors other than states and heritage domain-specific experts. The Committee’s focus on participation therefore serves to address broader issues of heritage governance, just seen through the lenses of the conceptualization and implementation of participation.