There is certainly a complex and long-standing relationship between World Heritage and tourism. Since tourism is mentioned only once among the 38 articles of the 1972 “Convention relating to the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” (UNESCO 1972), this has been very true in the daily practice of site management as it has long supported how world heritage sites are perceived, encountered and experienced in broader social and political perspectives. More than 40 years after the Convention, the consideration of tourism as an active variable in the production and consumption of World Heritage has gone from being implicit to being increasingly explicit in both policy and practice. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThere are obviously numerous sites on the World Heritage List in India and abroad which, due to tourist importance not only for reasons of protection, day-to-day management, or matters of physical and perceptual access, do not attract significant numbers of tourists. The designation of World Heritage status may fall on sites, particularly urban sites, that already have some degree of tourism activity. However, it is difficult to think of World Heritage sites without imagining swarms of tourists taking photographs, rows of parked tour buses and souvenir stalls, etc. Any type of tourist arriving at a World Heritage Site is faced with the reality of tourism. ; a significant number of tourists together with a service sector that has developed in size and scope to meet the needs of the temporary but recurring tourist population. Beyond the sign of long-term wear and tear on physical fabric and waste, there may be immediately visible indicators of excess tourists. The negative impact of tourism tends to be cumulative and hidden, revealing itself rather subtly through price inflation, community displacement and acculturation. More directly and visible is the process of infrastructure development associated with tourism development and, although not necessarily within the boundaries of World Heritage Sites, it has been argued that they can impact on the quality of the site (Leask and Fyall 2006) [72]. Within the tourism literature, considerable attention has been given to studies that exemplify the problems that tourism can, and does, pose to the physical fabric of cultural and natural heritage sites and the socio-cultural well-being of nearby local communities. These types of tourism studies have fueled, and are fueled by, a pervasive discourse that suggests that tourism is, in fact, a threat to World Heritage. Tourism impacts can be assessed, measured and managed, whatever their scale, but broader geopolitical questions are raised regarding the category of World Heritage Sites itself and whether there is indeed some degree of causality between the site designation and the ability to attract tourists. “World heritages are not homogeneous and their management is not monolithic” (Bourdeau, Gravari-barbas and Robinson 2011; Di Giovine 2009). They certainly differ considerably in terms of reputation, the scale of tourist flows around them, and the extent to which the state and related actors contribute (Ashworth and Van der Aa 2006). It is this diversity in the face of uniformity of production, and production at the nexus of global and local, that creates an interesting “mantle of heritages” (Di Giovine 2009) and an interesting field of research (Djament-tran, Fagnoni and Jacquot 2012 ). The existence of connections between tourism and World Heritage is evident in the network of.