Unequal Legacies: A Comparative Spatial Analysis of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage and World Heritage Site Inscriptions

UNESCO's World Heritage Sites (WHS) and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) lists represent the most ambitious international effort to identify and safeguard humanity's culturallegacy. Yet the geographic distribution of inscriptions across these two programmes and the degree to which that distribution aligns with UNESCO's stated representational equity goals remains insufficiently examined. This study provides a systematic comparative spatial analysis of all ICH and WHS inscriptions, employing fractional weighting to address themethodological challenge of transnational nominations. Results show a significant and structured heritage divide. WHS inscriptions are nearly twice as unequally distributed as ICH, with Europe and North America accounting for 46.5% of all weighted WHS while holding only 28.4% of ICH. Africa faces compounding disadvantages across both lists, with 59.5% of its 42 member states classified as double-underrepresented. Arab States present a paradox of high per-state heritage efficiency alongside the highest WHS danger proportion (21.9%), concentrated in conflict-affected states. These findings shed light to the fact that UNESCO's representational equity goals are unevenly met across both programmes, and that the structural asymmetries between the two lists are as analytically important as their individual distributions.