World Heritage Sites and their Margins in Southeast Asian Tourism Development: Heritage-scapes or Non-heritage Spaces?

Since UNESCO’s inscription of the first World Heritage Sites in Southeast Asia in the early 1990s, heritage tourism has become big business. What trajectories would tourism development follow in Cambodia without Angkor, or in Malaysia without Melaka, or in Thailand without Ayutthaya and Khao Yai? When UNESCO inscribes a heritage site and bestows on it global importance, it usually becomes an immediate tourist attraction and is subject to the pressures of increasing numbers of tourists and the development of the facilities and infrastructures which tourists demand. But what happens to those areas, cultures and communities which are excluded from this privileged status, on the margins of an international heritage site? Do they benefit or suffer economically, culturally and environmentally because of the arbitrary delineation of heritage boundaries? Case-studies are taken from Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia to explore the dilemmas created by an increasing preoccupation with the internationalization of heritage.