Since 2015, World Heritage Watch has organized an International Civil Society Forum with over 50 participants each year immediately prior to the sessions of the World Heritage Committee (in Bonn, Istanbul, Kraków, Bahrain and Baku). The World Heritage Centre and Advisory Bodies have always participated with high-level observers, and information about threats to specific World Heritage Sites was presented.
In 2019 and 2020, World Heritage Watch also organized such Forums at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in January / February, at the suggestion of the convention bodies, in order to make it easier for them to participate and to provide our information at an early stage so that it can be included in the draft Decisions of the Committee. The forums prior to the World Heritage Committee sessions are also continued in order to discuss strategic questions and to coordinate our interventions in the session.
Each year, World Heritage Watch publishes NGO reports from all over the world in our World Heritage Watch Report, which is read by officials, experts, scholars and journalists worldwide and can be downloaded free of charge from our website. They are also read by people at the sites, which helps to give local communities encouragement and strength. In addition to updates on known cases, new cases are added every year that were previously unknown to UNESCO. Some of our reports come from sites to which UNESCO itself has no or only limited access, e.g. Libya, Southeast Turkey or Tibet. Altogether we have reported on the situation at 105 sites on all continents.
Since 2015, World Heritage Watch has attended World Heritage Committee sessions every year and has made great strides for the participation of civil society. While we were given the floor only once in 2015, we were given the floor on every agenda item in 2017 – but only after the decisions had been adopted. However, since 2018 we have had the floor before the decisions were taken. At the 2019 session, we intervened a total of 13 times and also represented NGOs that could not be present.
In future we will seek more publicity in order to draw attention to some undesirable developments in the implementation of the World Heritage Convention such as the politicization of the decisions, the trivialization of the world heritage list, the global imbalance of sites, the lack of funding, the ignoring of Committee decisions by the State Parties, insufficient technical guidelines for the evaluation, nomination and management of the sites, insufficient participation of the population in the management of sites, etc.
We have also made progress in making the World Heritage a subject of development cooperation. We have approached the German Ministry for Development Cooperation,  indicating to them that almost without exception the threats to the sites are not so muchdue to a lack of commitment to conservation, but rather to a lack of commitment to appropriate sustainable development, with benefits shared by the local population. The long-term viability World Heritage Sites relies on local communities having a real stake in their site’s protection. Without such an environment, World Heritage Sites cannot be protected in the long term.
In our office we regularly employ interns from all over the world who are enrolled in the master’s program in World Heritage Studies at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. At the WHW Office they are exposed to the reality of safeguarding the World Heritage Sites.