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This article addresses the ways in which UNESCO’s ideological engagements are negotiated in the difference/diversity discourse as they are transferred from the international standard-setting level to the national and local contexts. It proposes the discursive construction of cosmopolitan internationalism as a framework for analysing the intersections of difference, located in the practicalities of internationalism, and diversity, tied to the ideals of cosmopolitanism, as they are manifested at the level of both the implementation of UNESCO’s Diversity Convention and urban policy making in the city of Sydney. The analysis suggests that ruptures challenging the homogenising diversity discourse rise from the national and local policy-making level, with such discourse simultaneously becoming an instrument for international differentiation. UNESCO’s normative cosmopolitan international tradition thus manifests itself as an obstacle against the emergence of transnational political spaces beyond the confines of the state, while it also carries with it a promise of facilitating such developments. peerReviewed

In 2010, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment launched a re-evaluation and revision of the 1993 inventory of Nationally Valuable Landscape Areas (NVLAs). While the inventory works for implementation of the National Land Use Guidelines, it also showcases the use of landscapes in Finnish national heritage policy. Based on critical readings of three influential Finnish administrative landscape policy reports, I claim that NVLAs, as tools of heritage policy, are based on the approaches and methodologies that have supported Finland’s development into a modern nation state by providing tools for intellectual governance of the national past and territory. Rather than meeting the diversity of landscape conceptions, as defined in the European Landscape Convention, the NVLAs run a risk of being in conflict with citizens and actors that do not share the administrative assumption of landscapes as public containers of national heritage.

Four governmental efforts are underway to reach consensus on indicators of sustainable forestry. Through the Helsinki process, European countries have developed and reached a pan-European, binding consensus, The Montreal process includes non-European Temperate and boreal forest countries, the International Tropical Timber Organization (lTTO) have developed guidelines for the sustainable management of natural tropical forests, and the countries around the Amazon basis have developed a joint initiative for creating guidelines of sustainable forest management of the Amazonian tropical rain forests. It is estimated that as many as 15â20 distinct processes are under way in the private sector by non-profit organizations and for-profit companies, some domestic and other international in scope. Perhaps the most wide-ranging definition work of non-governmental organizations is the undertake by the Forest Stewardship Council, FSC. The paper discusses the Helsinki and Montreal processes and the tasks for research.