The sustainable safeguarding of World Heritage can only be achieved through current and future civil society mobilisation. This project focused on young people as actors with the potential for looking forward and shaping the future. They are therefore the most important target group for the sustainable implementation of the goals, content and values of the World Heritage Convention.
In order to reach out to young people, we involved school students from different school types from various countries. Members of the UNESCO Associated School Network were identified as especially relevant as the project presented a chance to innovatively and creatively deal with World Heritage. Other interested schools nearby World Heritage Sites also joined the project.
The second important target group was the teaching staff. Teachers are the mediators of education and are therefore constitutive for every form of sustainable knowledge development and its sustainable communication.
Imparting knowledge about the importance of World Heritage for human development requires knowledge about World Heritage itself, the framework conditions for its protection and use, as well as the challenges to which humanity's heritage is exposed by the global community and its actions. Who could be better suited for this than the World Heritage sites, their managers and pedagogues themselves. They are the actors who have gained knowledge and experience in inscribing and managing World Heritage Sites, which they can pass on accordingly. In this respect, we identified the staff of World Heritage Sites as a third partner group.
Together, the students, teachers and World Heritage staff formed our project community with schools and World Heritage actors from Czech, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. The principle of transnational cooperation is also in line with the challenge of the climate crisis, which requires joint action across national borders. A basic principle of ESD - think globally, act locally - was thus directly incorporated in the project.
