Valuing and Sharing Island Heritage and Identities
© haiticulture
Jacmel Carnival
UNESCO supports SIDS in designing and implementing innovative cultural policies to strengthen heritage and creativity. This involves protecting and safeguarding tangible and intangible heritage, promoting responsible tourism, boosting creative industries and transmitting traditional knowledge through cultural institutions such as museums, archives and cultural centres, with a special focus on indigenous and local communities and youth.
The safeguarding of the historical environment in SIDS enhances the resilience of communities to threats resulting from uncontrolled globalization, natural disasters and climate change. When peoples and communities are affected by disasters or challenged by rapid change, cultural programmes that support the rehabilitation of heritage, traditions and institutions can help restore a sense of continuity, self-esteem and confidence in the future. Consideration for culture should therefore be integrated into disaster-risk reduction and climate-change mitigation, as well as adaptation plans and policies.
- Full summary in Islands of the Future – Building resilience in a changing world (pdf)
Improving World Heritage management
© UNESCO/Yvette Lee
The World Heritage Small Island Developing States Programme provides SIDS with support and assistance in managing their listed properties and preparing new nominations for the World Heritage List. As of July 2013, over 300 participants have benefitted from the workshops run within this programme. In the framework of this programme, a project aiming to develop regional capacity-building activities for Pacific and African SIDS and to strengthen the existing activities in Caribbean SIDS was approved in 2011.
Backstopping museums
Museums are playing an increasingly crucial role in ensuring the transmission of knowledge about cultural heritage, at a time when the role of communities and extended families has been weakened by globalization. In addition to supporting a number of museums in the Pacific, UNESCO is developing a regional project to support documentation centres and museums in the vicinity of World Heritage sites in the Pacific in collaboration with the Pacific Islands Museum Association.
In 2010, it provided training in documenting and promoting cultural property to help Timor-Leste safeguard its movable cultural heritage. UNESCO assisted the Samoan authorities in producing a report on the Museum in Samoa: Past, Present and Future and contributed to improving the website of the National Museum of Samoa. UNESCO is also helping to preserve the Fiji Deed of Cession and other key items of documentary heritage in Fiji, through the Memory of the World programme.
Supporting the emergence of dynamic culture sectors
In recent years, there have been two main international mechanisms for implementing the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in SIDS. The first is the International Fund for Cultural Diversity. Since 2010, over 10% of the fund has been devoted to projects in SIDS. The projects cover areas ranging from the development and implementation of national cultural policies, to strengthening cultural industries as a means of tackling youth unemployment in most deprived areas, to improving access to international markets for creative industry professionals.
The second mechanism is the UNESCO−EU funded project for an Expert Facility
to Strengthen the System of Governance for Culture in Developing Countries.
From 2011 to 2013, this project provided four SIDS with technical assistance:
Barbados, Haiti, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Using intangible heritage to strengthen community resilience
The contribution of intangible cultural heritage to strengthening community resilience to natural disasters and climate change has been attracting increasing attention. Examples include traditional knowledge relating to weather forecasting, vernacular buildings, village governance and the reciprocal exchange of items of traditional wealth for social networking and protection.