Start date: 06 June 2017
End date: 16 June 2017
Location: Røros Mining Town and the Circumference WH site in Norway
Number of Participants: 20
Nationalities: 20
Executive Summary
The first international course on “Linking Nature and Culture in World Heritage Site Management” (LNC17) was organized by ICCROM and IUCN with the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment. It was held in Røros Mining Town and the Circumference World Heritage Site in Norway from 6 to 16 June 2017.
The overall goal of the course was for participants to make use of added knowledge, skills, and awareness to address nature and culture interlinkages, of which people are an integral part. Another goal was to improve the approaches to management and governance of a diverse set of World Heritage sites, through shared experiences from both sectors.
The course provided a unique opportunity for 20 participants from diverse backgrounds, representing 20 countries from around the globe, to interact with numerous national and international experts who shared their experiences managing natural and cultural heritage. The course balanced the number participants and instructors from the natural and cultural sectors to ensure both sectors were represented.
The course created a platform for networking among conservation practitioners from across the natural and cultural heritage sectors. Feedback from participants and the course evaluation indicated a very high level of satisfaction.
The course curriculum was developed in 2014 through a series of activities designed to ‘address nature–culture interlinkages in the management of World Heritage sites’. Over the next two years, course modules were tested during training activities run by ICCROM. This included the course on People Centred Approaches to Conservation of Nature and Culture. Tsukuba University in Japan used the newly developed curriculum as the basis for a course related to this theme.
The course at Røros brought together all these experiences to address the relationship between people (including local communities and indigenous peoples) and the cultural and natural values of sites, including how sites and their surrounding land and seascapes are managed.
