In February 2026, United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki, issued a landmark report arguing that cultural relationships with the environment are a core component of international human rights law. The report rejects the long-dominant State-centric “fortress conservation” model – an approach that protects nature by excluding or restricting the people who live with and care for those environments. Instead, it emphasises that biodiversity and cultural diversity are inseparable and that nature conservation cannot come at the expense of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. One year earlier, the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems sought to advance this same vision within the World Heritage system. This post argues that while the Gunma Declaration represents a significant step towards recognising the interconnected relationships between Indigenous Peoples, culture, nature, and intangible heritage, its development also reveals how difficult it remains for international heritage institutions to move beyond symbolic recognition towards meaningful Indigenous participation and self-determination.

The Special Rapporteur’s 2026 report is significant because it challenges one of the foundational assumptions of modern conservation: that nature can be protected separately from the people who live with, care for, and derive meaning from it. Instead, the report emphasises that human rights, cultural practices, knowledge systems, traditions, and relationships with places are not obstacles to conservation. They are often among its strongest foundations.

The Gunma Declaration reflects this same shift. Adopted in January 2025 following an international symposium convened in Japan by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) – the statutory advisory body on cultural heritage to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) – the declaration introduces the concept of “heritage ecosystems”. This concept understands heritage not as isolated sites or objects, but as interconnected relationships between peoples, places, knowledge systems, cultures, and environments. Significantly, the Gunma Declaration is the first framework to explicitly reference Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as part of the World Heritage system’s understanding of cultural authenticity. The UNESCO World Heritage system is the international system through which States identify, nominate, and manage heritage places under the 1972 World Heritage Convention.

In many respects, this represents a historic development. Indigenous Peoples have long criticised the World Heritage system for separating nature from culture and for treating Indigenous communities as stakeholders rather than self-determining rights-holders. The Gunma Declaration moves in a different direction. It recognises Indigenous traditions, knowledge systems, and relationships with ancestral homelands as central components of heritage governance. It also acknowledges that heritage is not static. Rather, it is a living system sustained through ongoing relationships between communities and the environments they inhabit.

Yet the development of the Gunma Declaration also revealed a more uncomfortable reality. The problem was not simply that Indigenous Peoples were absent from the international symposium’s scientific committee that prepared the early drafts of the declaration. It was that Indigenous worldviews, knowledge systems, and understandings of the inseparability of communities, nature, culture, and intangible heritage were being drawn upon, while Indigenous Peoples themselves were systematically excluded, silenced, and erased from the initial deliberation process and declaration text. Some symposium participants argued that explicitly naming Indigenous Peoples would cause division. In one small-group discussion, Indigenous cultures were also described as “contaminated”, and it was argued on that basis that they did not warrant explicit reference. Indeed, Indigenous Peoples and UNDRIP were only included in the adopted text through sustained intervention.

This is how human rights violations in heritage governance materialise. International heritage institutions – tasked with protecting cultural diversity – may advance concepts that closely reflect Indigenous understandings of land, culture, nature, rights, and relational responsibility, yet present them as Western innovations – often excluding Indigenous Peoples. The substantive gap the Gunma Declaration presents is thus one of authority: longstanding Indigenous understandings were “Columbused” (presented as newly discovered Western ideas) to inform the concept of “heritage ecosystems”, while Indigenous Peoples themselves remained marginal to the structures that interpreted and institutionalised those ideas.

The pressing challenge facing conservation, heritage governance, and human rights is not simply how Indigenous rights and authority should be incorporated. The difficult reality is that heritage institutions are often unwilling to even acknowledge Indigenous existence and knowledge systems on Indigenous Peoples’ own terms.

Although the Gunma Declaration is significant, the declaration also reminds us that meaningful change requires more than “Columbusing” Indigenous concepts. It requires Indigenous Peoples to be meaningfully included from the outset and recognised as self-determining rights-holders with authority over the cultures, places, and environments they help sustain.

Note: this post draws on my open-access article in the International Journal of Cultural Property, titled “Critical Reflections on the Development of the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems: Challenges, Contradictions, and Opportunities for Indigenous Peoples”. The article was awarded the May 2026 #PaperOfTheMonth by Cambridge University Press and is part of a Special Issue on Decolonising Cultural Property: Indigenous Perspectives and Challenges.