Contributions of a Heritage Values-based Approach to Rock Art Management. Lessons from the Maloti-Drakensberg World Heritage Site,South Africa

This paper is based on rock art sites of the Maloti-Drakensberg massif (South African part), where more than 600 decorated shelters have thus far been identified. Being both institutionalised heritage sites open to the public and living heritage sites associated with various social practices and utilizations, their preservation requires us to consider the complexity of the values attributed to them. Combining a multidisciplinary and empirical approach, our paper highlights the processes of hybridization between attributed values, which therefore do not adhere to a strict category approach. Being strongly linked to the contexts in which they are articulated, their identification is coupled with a consideration of the macrodynamics in which rock art sites are integrated, as well as an analysis of the links between these different contexts and the value systems identified. In conclusion, the operational dimensions of such a methodology is questioned and some initial possibilities for action are proposed.     

Disequilibrium in Development Finance: The Contested Politics of Institutional Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank Inspection Panel

This article examines the dynamic nature with which independent accountability mechanisms operate. Focusing on the World Bank, the authors argue that its Inspection Panel evolves according to internal and external pressures. In seeking to achieve equilibrium, and protect its authority and independence, the Panel has gone through several distinct phases: negotiation, emergence, protracted resistance, assertion of independence and authority, renewed tension, and contestation. The core novelty of the article is its application of concepts from outside the field of development studies — notably institutional accountability from the governance literature, and judicialization from the legal studies literature — to the topic of the Inspection Panel. Examining the Panel in this way demonstrates that accountability mechanisms represent a hybrid of transnational governance influenced by a range of actors including project‐affected peoples, national governments, managers and development donors. Accountability in development finance is about competing interests as well as competing conceptions and expectations of accountability. In such a complex and multi‐scalar system, the Panel is not only concerned with delivering well‐researched investigation reports; it is also an entity seeking to ensure its own survival, as well as an arbiter of its own brand of legitimacy and accountability.