Monitoring the management’s impacts of UNESCO World Heritage sites

The World Heritage Convention is knowing an increasing attention by analysts and scholars, but still many important issues related to its functioning and its potential are not adequately addressed. This gap is evident, for instance, in relation to the setting up of effective and efficient programs for managing the listed sites, and measuring and evaluating the managemnet impacts on local economic systems. Managing World Heritage cultural Sites implies in fact, at the present state of the art, many questions and challenges to be faced, including the functioning of the organization structures, the mitigation of pressures and threats on sites, the necessity to drive programs and policies towards generating positive and durable social and economic impacts for the communities living in and around the same sites. The aim of this paperis to present the results of some ongoing activities and researches on this specific topics with a special reference to the management plan tool as it is defined by the same UNESCO reccomendations.