Led by the new Director-General, Khaled El-Enany, the UNESCO80 initiative has been launched as a process of reflection on the future role of the organisation. Through engagement with Member States, partners and networks, it aims to examine how UNESCO can adapt its structures, priorities and partnerships to remain effective in a changing global landscape.
Rather than a traditional anniversary celebration, UNESCO80 is framing this moment as an opportunity for strategic renewal. The focus is shifting from large-scale programme delivery towards mobilising UNESCO’s distinctive strengths: legitimacy, convening power, normative mandate, and global networks.
From our perspective, this shift feels not only sensible but overdue.
Where UNESCO’s Value Really Shows Up
In the UK, our experience shows that UNESCO’s comparative advantage is not speed or scale. Instead, its value lies in setting shared frameworks, aligning diverse actors, and mobilising the relational power of its networks - locally embedded institutions and communities working with thousands of partners across policy, culture, science and education to address complex challenges over the long term.
This is most visible not only at Headquarters in Paris, but in how UNESCO works through its global, yet locally rooted networks of sites and programmes.
UNESCO’s networks - including sites (e.g., Biospheres, Creative Cities, Geoparks, World Heritage Sites), National Commissions, Chairs, schools, archives, and cultural institutions - are not passive assets. Embedded in local communities and systems, these networks are existing platforms for translating global norms into local action, empowering communities to drive change and feeding local learning back into international thinking. With sustained support - they could become strategic infrastructure for advancing UNESCO’s mission.
This insight sits at the heart of the approach we've been developing at the UK National Commission for UNESCO.
From Designations to Living Laboratories
The UK National Commission for UNESCO increasingly sees its network of sites not just as designation holders, but as living laboratories - places to test, adapt, and operationalise UNESCO’s ideas through partnership-led, place-based approaches. Conserving culture, heritage, and nature remains foundational, but our work has shown how UNESCO’s impact extends far beyond recognition alone.
This perspective has driven the creation of numerous programmes and activities:
- Local to Global focuses on strengthening the human and relational capacity of UNESCO sites across the UK and their partners. Supporting peer-to-peer exchange, international collaboration, and community-to-community partnerships, it helps sites build the long-term relationships that underpin effective collaboration.
- Climate Change and UNESCO Heritage (CCUH) was built on our joint report with the Canadian Commission, investing in systems and tools for strategic partnership. By mapping governance ecosystems, developing shared data infrastructures, and piloting partnership-mapping tools, CCUH enabled sites to understand interdependencies, identify leverage points, and coordinate action across sectors.
A central lesson from this work is that culture is rarely the end goal. It is the platform through which societies address wider challenges such as climate resilience, livelihoods, wellbeing and social cohesion when partnerships are activated systemically.
For example, this network and culture-led approach shaped the development of our UNESCO Scotland Trail with VisitScotland, the Scottish Government, and the network of Scottish UNESCO sites. The Trail connected UNESCO sites into a shared national narrative aligned with sustainable tourism. It serves as a coordination mechanism, capacity-building platform, and policy bridge linking culture, environment, tourism, and place.
Making Partnership Value Visible
One of the persistent challenges for UNESCO - and for multilateral institutions more broadly - is demonstrating the value of partnership working in ways that resonate with governments and funders. While partnerships are widely recognised as essential to addressing complex challenges, their impact is often difficult to evidence using traditional metrics that prioritise direct outputs or programme delivery.
In response, we are partnering with the Creative Policy and Evidence Centre to develop a new study and methodology to measure both the economic and non-economic value generated through partnerships within UNESCO sites. Rather than forcing sites into predefined frameworks, the approach begins by mapping governance and partnership ecosystems - understanding who is involved, how collaboration functions, and where coordination creates leverage (and the value that UNESCO status brings). Analytical lenses, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, can then be applied to identify how these partnerships contribute to wider public value.
What This Means for UNESCO80
UK experience suggests that partnerships are no longer supplementary to UNESCO’s mission. In a constrained funding environment, they are the delivery mechanism. This means that UNESCO needs to operate less as a traditional programme delivery organisation and more as a networked institution, working through partnerships embedded in local systems around the world.
That raises real challenges for the organisation:
- moving from designation to mobilisation of its network as a whole
- reducing internal fragmentation across sectors and field structures
- balancing flexibility with accountability
- and developing shared ways to evidence value without stifling local agency
These are not marginal operational issues. They go to the heart of institutional renewal. UNESCO’s designation and accreditation processes remain central to maintaining quality and credibility across its global networks. However, designation alone is no longer sufficient. The challenge is increasingly how UNESCO mobilises and supports these networks, enabling designated sites and programmes to work together, share knowledge and generate wider value.
UNESCO80 therefore presents a clear choice between remaining a primarily symbolic milestone, or becoming the catalyst for a more network-driven organisation - one that mobilises its sites, National Commissions and knowledge networks as engines of delivery and innovation.
From a UK perspective, embracing this shift would strengthen - not dilute - UNESCO’s global leadership, rooting ambition in partnerships and practices capable of carrying it forward for the next 80 years.
