• Balancing global visibility and local ownership

Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands, including the Peak Wilderness Protected Area, Horton Plains National Park, and Knuckles Conservation Forest, gained renewed international attention when the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) praised the country’s conservation efforts during its periodic review. 

Meanwhile, proposals for the inscription of the ancient hydraulic civilisation sites of the dry zone were in full swing within the ministerial corridors. The familiar choreography followed: press conferences rehearsed national pride, tourism officials calculated the percentage rise in projected revenues, and patriotic fervour spilled over in social media.

This recurring spectacle of heritage celebration conceals a far more complex and distressing reality regarding who actually controls our cultural patrimony and at what cost global recognition arrives.

The machinery for international heritage recognition has been normalised to such a degree that we rarely question the assumptions lying at its base. Every new nomination, every UNESCO review, every appearance within global heritage lists is represented as an unambiguous achievement. 

Beneath the congratulatory rhetoric, however, lies a more fundamental question, and one that demands rigorous examination: are we preserving our heritage or repackaging it for international consumption? More critically, whose voices determine the answer?

The reality of local dispossession

The Sri Lankan cultural landscape today stands at an important juncture where the promise of global visibility meets the reality of local dispossession. As we enthusiastically parade our ancient cities, colonial fortifications, and sacred sites before international audiences, it is perhaps time to question very substantially the framing terminology itself. 

For instance, the terms ‘indigenous,’ ‘local,’ and ‘global’ have become so embedded in heritage discourse that we rarely question the meanings of these words. These apparently neutral descriptions carry enormous ideological baggage, shaping not just how we describe our heritage but who controls it, who benefits from it, and indeed, finally, who possesses interpretive authority over its meaning.

The urgency of this examination has intensified as Sri Lanka navigates its worst economic crisis since independence. Tourism has been positioned as a critical source of revenue, with heritage sites serving as primary attractions. 

This economic imperative adds new pressures to already fraught debates about heritage management, and it is likely to subordinate principles of preservation and community rights to the imperatives of international tourism markets. When ancient temples are reduced to ‘products’ and sacred spaces become ‘attractions,’ it is appropriate to question what it is that is being preserved, and what is being irretrievably lost.

Consider the term ‘indigenous.’ In Sri Lankan heritage discussions, it comes across as a marker of authenticity – indigenous knowledge, indigenous craftsmanship, indigenous traditions. Government publications, archaeological reports, and tourism brochures use the term liberally, often without definition or qualification. 

But what does ‘indigenous’ really mean in a place where successive waves of migration, conquest, and cultural exchange have taken place over millennia? Prince Vijaya came from northern India, the Tamils from southern India, the Moors brought with them Arab influences, the Portuguese imposed Christianity, the Dutch reorganised coastal societies, and the British remade the entire administrative apparatus. Which layer is indigenous, and who has the power to define it?

The danger lies not in the acknowledgment of this complexity, but in the way the term ‘indigenous’ becomes weaponised within contemporary heritage politics.

This search for an ‘indigenous’ heritage is often a reflection of present-day political anxieties rather than any historical realities. Within the context of postwar Sri Lanka, heritage has emerged as a highly contested site where rival nationalisms stake their competing claims. 

The ways in which archaeological evidence is interpreted, museums display their artifacts, and sites are presented become proxies for broader debates of national identity, ethnic belonging, and political legitimacy. Certain sites being labelled indigenously carry implications far beyond academic classification; this becomes ammunition in ongoing struggles over territorial control, resource allocation, and communal recognition.

Equally problematic is the uncritical embracing of ‘local’ as a counterpoint to foreign influence. The rhetoric of ‘local ownership’ has become the rallying cry of heritage activists, especially when resisting what they perceive as external interference. 

This resistance is not without merit: during the colonial period, there was systematic plunder of Sri Lankan artefacts, and indeed, the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and many European collections still hold treasures removed from temples and archaeological sites. Contemporary tourism often commodifies sacred spaces beyond recognition, transforming living religious sites into sanitised attractions where spirituality becomes performance for foreign cameras.

But ‘local’ is a term that, more often than not, obscures internal power imbalances that equally require consideration. Who constitutes ‘local’ when a heritage site falls within a community of many ethnic and religious groups? Colombo’s Department of Archaeology may claim a role representing local interests, but does it in fact speak on behalf of the village families who have lived beside ancient ruins for many decades? 

When the Government designates the area around a sacred place as an archaeological zone, removing residents in the name of preservation, whose locality takes precedence? The term ‘local’ too quickly becomes a convenient fiction, used by urban elites to legitimise their rule over rural heritage in the service of resisting globalisation.

Walk through any recently ‘developed’ heritage site in Sri Lanka, and you will observe this dynamic. Information boards appear in English and Sinhala, sometimes Tamil, explaining the site’s significance according to archaeological interpretation. 

But the elderly residents who once offered flowers at these shrines, who transmitted oral histories about these places, who understood their spiritual geography in ways no academic survey can capture, these people have often been relocated, their homes demolished to create ‘buffer zones’ and ‘visitor facilities.’ The local, it seems, exists primarily as an abstract concept to be invoked rhetorically rather than as actual people with rights and knowledge.

The cost of global visibility 

This brings us to the most seductive and dangerous term of all: ‘global.’ 

UNESCO World Heritage status represents the pinnacle of global recognition, turning sites into international commodities. The benefits seem undeniable – more tourist dollars, international conservation funds, technical know-how, and a source of national pride that might transcend ethnic and religious divides. 

For a country reeling from decades of civil war and recent economic collapse, these benefits have particular resonance. Global heritage status promises foreign exchange earnings, jobs, and international prestige at a time when all three are needed most.

Yet global visibility demands that these sites be reshaped in conformity with international standards of presentation, conservation, and interpretation. Ancient sites must be sanitised, contextualised, and packaged for foreign consumption. 

This process is neither neutral nor innocent. It reflects the aesthetic preferences, cultural assumptions, and conservation philosophies developed primarily in European contexts and subsequently universalised through international organisations dominated by Western expertise and funding.

Take a stroll through the Galle Fort today, and you will find boutique hotels occupying Portuguese-era buildings and serving fusion cuisine to European tourists who pay more for a single meal than many Sri Lankan families earn in a week. Galleries show contemporary work alongside colonial artefacts; yoga studios offer sessions at sunrise on ramparts built by Dutch soldiers; craft shops offer ‘authentic’ Sri Lankan products often manufactured elsewhere. 

The ‘global’ transformation certainly preserved the physical structures, investing millions in restoration that Government budgets could never match. But at what cost to the living culture that once animated these spaces?

The Burgher and Muslim communities who called the fort home for generations have largely been displaced, unable to afford rents inflated by international interest. The small shops selling household goods to local residents have given way to establishments catering exclusively to tourists. 

The Tamil fishermen who once sold their catch at the fort’s northern gate now operate from a relocated market, invisible to visitors who experience Galle as a carefully curated colonial tableau. The global has arrived, resplendent in its restored glory, but the local has quietly departed, priced out of its own heritage.

A fundamental conflict 

The fundamental tension lies in the asymmetry of the global heritage regime. International bodies like UNESCO, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and the World Monuments Fund operate according to frameworks that were developed mainly in Europe and North America. 

These frameworks privilege certain forms of heritage – monumental architecture, archaeological ruins, ‘tangible’ culture – while too often sidelining others. The intangible heritage of oral traditions, ritual practices, and community knowledge struggles for equivalent recognition, despite being far more significant to the communities concerned.

Consider the disparity in resources. A mediaeval cathedral in Europe might receive millions in conservation funding from national governments, European Union cultural programmes, and private foundations. Meanwhile, an equally ancient Buddhist temple in rural Sri Lanka must rely on the donations of impoverished villagers, supplemented perhaps by occasional grants from overstretched Government departments. 

International organisations will fund spectacular restoration projects at headline sites like Polonnaruwa, where results can be photographed and publicised, whilst hundreds of smaller temples, mosques, and kovils deteriorate unnoticed in villages across the island. The ‘global’ gaze is selective, and its selections reflect geopolitical and economic priorities rather than intrinsic cultural significance.

Further, the knowledge systems underlying international heritage management are often in fundamental conflict with local epistemologies. Western conservation science, expressed in documents such as the Venice Charter and subsequent guidelines produced by ICOMOS, demands minimal intervention, full documentation, and reversibility of all conservation actions. 

These principles embody very specific philosophical assumptions about authenticity, materiality, and the relationship between past and present. Traditional Sri Lankan modes of temple maintenance include regular repainting, periodic rebuilding, and ritual renewal – practices understood not as threats to authenticity but as vital to sustaining the spiritual potency of sacred spaces.

When international conservators insist that ancient murals must not be touched, that only documentation and protective measures are appropriate, they clash with monks and devotees who believe that maintaining the spiritual potency of sacred art requires active engagement, not preservation under glass. 

When UNESCO guidelines discourage rebuilding of deteriorated stupas, they conflict with Buddhist traditions that understand periodic reconstruction as meritorious religious practice. These are not simply technical disagreements but deep epistemological conflicts about the nature of heritage itself.

This is not to romanticise local practices uncritically; indeed, some traditional methods accelerate deterioration, and some proposed interventions would cause irreversible damage. Rather, it is to point out the ways that ‘global standards’ function as instruments of epistemic colonialism, articulating the superiority of Western scientific knowledge while dismissing alternative frameworks as primitive, uninformed, or lacking in rigour. 

The global does not enter as a neutral arbiter offering expertise but as a force that reshapes local knowledge in its own image, determining what counts as legitimate heritage practice and what must be reformed or eliminated.

Finding solutions 

The solution cannot be a rejection of global engagement in the name of an isolated ‘local’ preservation. This would be both impracticable and unwelcome in today’s interconnected world where heritage conservation needs technical expertise, financial resources, and the economic benefits that tourism can bring in. 

International collaboration has unquestionably prevented the destruction of numerous monuments; without UNESCO intervention and international funding, many of Sri Lanka’s most significant sites would have suffered irreparable damage during the war years and the subsequent economic instability.

This often involves re-envisioning such relationships in terms of greater equity and developing frameworks sensitive to local knowledge and authority while drawing productively on international skill and resources. 

This demands far-reaching changes in how heritage is conceptualised and managed, shifting from the globally dominant paternalistic models towards genuinely collaborative approaches which respect multiple forms of expertise and multiple legitimate interests in heritage sites.

We must first abandon the fiction of clearly bounded categories: there is no pure ‘indigenous’ culture untouched by outside influence, no ‘local’ community free from internal hierarchies and conflicts, and no ‘global’ standard that is truly universal rather than the universalisation of particular cultural assumptions. 

These are political constructs, deployed strategically by different actors to advance particular interests and consolidate specific forms of power. The first step in more honest conversations about heritage that acknowledge complexity, contestation, and the impossibility of neutral technical solutions to fundamentally political questions is to recognise these terms as political constructs.

Second, we need radically decentralised decision-making structures that would transfer real power from centralised bureaucracies to community-level organisations. Heritage management in Sri Lanka remains highly centralised, with no relationship to local communities and understanding heritage primarily through regulatory frameworks and international guidelines. 

There can only be genuine local ownership if real power and resources are transferred to community-level organisations, where diverse ways of managing their heritage by a given community should be granted, some of which may go against international conservation standards.

This decentralisation needs to go beyond mere token consultation exercises where communities are invited to comment on preconceived plans. It demands constitutional and legal reforms that recognise community rights over heritage sites, participatory governance arrangements which accord local people real decision-making powers, and resource allocation mechanisms that route funds directly to the communities, bypassing central departments. 

It also means acknowledging that heritage management is going to be more diverse, less standardised, and probably more contentious, but ultimately more democratic, more responsive, and hence more sustainable.

Third, we should challenge the global heritage regime itself. Rather than joining the existing system on its set terms, Sri Lanka and other post-colonial nations should join together to reshape that system. This is a matter of pressing for greater representation in international heritage organisations, affirming the validity of non-Western knowledge systems, and refusing the false dichotomy between global relevance and local control. 

It entails building global South-South networks that create alternatives to Global North-dominated institutions, developing regional frameworks reflecting Asian philosophical traditions and conservation practices, and claiming the right to determine heritage significance according to local values rather than universal criteria devised elsewhere.

We need new narratives indicative of the actual complexity of our heritage, rather than the simplified stories which tourism marketing and nationalist politics favour. 

Rather than preserving Galle Fort in amber as a colonial relic, recognise it as a living space continuously created by Portuguese, Dutch, British, Burgher, Muslim, Sinhalese, and Tamil communities, each leaving their marks, each adapting inherited structures to their own purposes. 

These more complex narratives are not only more accurate historically, but they provide models for contemporary multi-ethnic coexistence in a country that is still healing from ethnic conflict.

Cultural heritage stands at a crossroads, not between tradition and modernity, but between domination and dialogue. The question is not whether we should engage with the global – that ship sailed centuries ago when the first Portuguese ships appeared off our coasts – but on what terms that engagement occurs. 

Will we continue accepting frameworks that treat our heritage as resources to be managed by international experts and consumed by foreign tourists? Or will we insist on relationships that respect the knowledge, priorities, and authority of the communities for whom these sites are not merely heritage but home?

The decision will determine whether the next generation of Sri Lankans inherits a living culture or only the museumified remains of one. These are not technical questions to be resolved by heritage professionals but political ones needing democratic deliberation and genuine community participation. 

The crossroads demands not just better conservation techniques but fundamentally reimagined relationships between people, power, and the past.

(The writer is an ethnographer and art historian specialising in material culture, critical museum studies, and participatory research methodologies. As a member of Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era (PPROCE), the Netherlands and Dutch Research Council (NWO) committees, she engages with repatriation and decolonisation debates. She currently holds a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Research Fellowship in the Netherlands)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)