UNESCO World Heritage Aotearoa New Zealand has remained largely anchored to state-centred agency Western epistemologies since the early 2000s. This contrasts with international shifts that emphasise Indigenous-led frameworks, community participation, and integrated cultural landscape approaches to Outstanding Universal Value (OUV).

This paper selects ancestral “stonescapes” as narrative anchors to examine how Māori-led conservation initiatives, national policy developments, and current efforts refresh the national World Heritage outlook, signalling movement toward a more culturally grounded approach aligned with contemporary UNESCO guidance.

Case studies highlight opportunities to reframe existing and potential sites: updating the Auckland Volcanic Field to reflect the Tūpuna Maunga Authority kaupapa; recognising Ōamaru's broader limestone cultural landscape through Ngāi Tahu-led heritage work; and contrasting Te Wāhipounamu’s outdated natural‑criteria OUV with dynamic iwi governance of Pounamu. Additional examples, including Pakohe management and Taranaki Maunga’s legal personhood, demonstrate how whakapapa and kaitiakitanga‑based stewardship offer a decolonised, future‑focused model for World Heritage governance.

This paper examines the ontological contradictions inherent in applying the UNESCO Global Geopark (UGG) designation to the Shetland Islands. It argues that top-down, universalist governance models reconstitute lived, relational landscapes as commodified heritage products within a global market. This process is founded upon a historically constructed nature-culture binary, which legitimises state authority and enables the branding of place through romanticised ideals such as “wildness.” Consequently, local community heritage and everyday environmental relations (embodied in the Māori concept of Tūhono) are often marginalised as external to conservation narratives. Drawing on critiques of this dualistic framework, the study advocates for a geosocial approach to heritage governance. This approach conceptualises landscapes as co-produced spaces, where sustainable management emerges from recognising the interconnected web of human and more-than-human relationships, rather than from categorical separations between nature and culture.

As the neoliberal economic project lurches towards fascism and environmental destruction there are increasing calls to move towards a genuine economy of care, but to achieve this, mainstream white policymakers need to rethink the idea of cultural heritage. Rather than rationing heritage as a scarce resource that confers status or distinction, an ‘abundance’ model inspired by First Nations thinking grounds heritage practice as care for self, others and the things we have inherited, and conservation as foundational to an economy of care. Aotearoa has led the way in showing how cultural heritage can be mainstreamed in public policy but this kind of work is increasingly challenged by neoliberal economic models that marginalise culture and heritage, grounded in implicit whiteness. This paper will draw on new research into the current barriers to integrating cultural heritage into wider public policy and where the future of heritage policy might lie.

Like every good superhero film, World Heritage in Oceania needs an origin story. While today all Pacific states are party to the Convention, this paper returns to a time when World Heritage maps of Oceania were blank, an (oceanic) continent standing between UNESCO and the achievement of universal ratification for the Convention. While scholars have taken us into the halls where the Convention was drafted and sites debated for inscription on the World Heritage List, a crucial step has been missed: how states and regions came to enter the World Heritage regime in the first place. Using fresh archival material and participant accounts this paper traces the origins of the Convention in Oceania, illuminating how the story unfolded and set the trajectories for the ambivalent role of the Convention to date in the region's cultural and environmental resilience, and how it might—via the 'Blue Pacific Continent' narrative—yet be otherwise.