winterkjm:
East Asia has a couple countries perhaps approaching their course in regards to their tentative list.Japan (active, but as we've seen Japan's nominations are no longer inscribed easily.)
I'm not surprised why recent Japanese sites are no longer easy to inscribe (Hiraizumi, Iwami Ginzan, Kamakura and Nagasaki). This is the result of decentralization of cultural department. Instead of central government's work to write nomination dossier, local governments are the one who create the nomination package, site selection and drafting OUV. It is normal for local government to put sites they want to inscribe to get support from many locals even those sites are not strongly relevant to the whole OUV presentation. Actually it is almost a bureaucratic miracle to combine sites from different prefectures (Nagasaki Churches is a good example of collaboration between Nagasaki and Kumamoto, but when they have to redraw the nomination, Kumamoto denied to withdraw any sites and Nagasaki has no choice but to withdraw its own sites instead).
Kamakura is a good case for what prefecture idea can go wrong. The original idea of central government toward Kamakura is similar to Kyoto and Nara as old capital. OK! time change and now just old capital is not enough to show OUV, and local government pick the idea of Samurai and sadly rejected by ICOMOS, and now their idea shift to Zen Buddhism! And nobody know this idea has been carefully selected or not.
Another example is the idea to extend Himeji to cover other great Japanese castles, Hikone, Matsumoto, Matsue and Inuyama. In the old time central government can finish this great potential easily, but now all five prefectures have to work together and seem that it is unlikely to happen as each prefecture has its own idea and budget plan.
In Asia, not only Japan that this decentralization happened and effected the site nomination, India, Indonesia and Thailand are having the same fate. Each local government pick the site as they want and send to central authority to approve before sent to WHC. The good thing is that this way put tentative list to be very active from many ambitious local politician, but produce only few good site to show OUV. I was surprised to know that Indonesian government has no idea to propose Jakarta until recently after decentralization. Chiang Mai has been push by the university and the city itself and no support from Bangkok whose original idea was just plan to nominate one stupa 150 Km from Chiang Mai and currently such site are already forgotten and no support from locals!