ABSTRACT
This chapter recommends the process of deconstructing stakeholders and their profiles, localization of Sustainable Development Goals, implementing Adaptive Management Approach to improve the effectiveness of State-Based Management Systems and World Heritage Site (WHS) governance, converting challenges into opportunities, creativity, and innovation as a function of multidisciplinary mindsets at WHS. Conservation and sustainable development (SD) are “inseparable” and “inexorable” stakeholder-driven processes at WHS. This relationship has its roots in pre-colonial Africa. Engaging and involving stakeholders is inseparable from legislative context, evolving land uses, development needs, politics, social environment, and heritage value layers at WHS. The “construction” of development value proposition, including its benefits at WHS, is a stakeholder function negotiating within the rigidity of WHS value proposition. WHS governance represents an “extremely complex” system supposedly “involving multiple stakeholders”, yet empirically it is marginalizing them. The relationship between conservation and SD is as old as humanity itself and thus remains evolving.
