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Stefanie Maack, Tuuli Veersalu, Henri Järv, Asnate Ziemele CULTURAL HERITAGE PILOT PROJECTS AT THE BALTIC GREEN BELT CULTURAL HERITAGE PILOT PROJECTS AT THE BALTIC GREEN BELT: LESSONS LEARNED AND POTENTIALS FOR FUTURE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT ABSTRACT Stefanie Maack Kiel University, Department of Geography Ludewig-Meyn-Str. 14, DE-24118 Kiel, Germany s.maack@geographie.uni-kiel.de www.balticgreenbelt.net Tuuli Veersalu, Henri Järv Estonian University of Life Sciences Department of Landscape Management and Nature Conservation Fr.R.Kreutzwaldi 5, 51014 Tartu, Estonia tuuliveersalu@gmail.com; henri.jarv@emu.ee Asnate Ziemele Latvian Association for Rural Tourism “Lauku Celotajs” Kalnciema 40, 3 rd floor, LV-1046 Riga, Latvia asnate@celotajs.lv The Baltic Green Belt runs along the Baltic Sea coast between the Finnish-Russian border in the north and the town of Lübeck, Germany, in the south. Since 2009, a number of non-governmental, governmental and scientific organisations have been working to establish the vision of the European Green Belt – to create a pan-european ecological network from the Barents to the Black and Adriatic Seas – in this region. The Baltic Green Belt is characterised by a comparatively high number of formally protected areas, a high number of military objects from the times of the Iron Curtain (1945- 1991) and a high potential for sustainable tourism development as one form of Green Belt regional development. Two out of a number of pilot projects for sustainable Green Belt development focused on the use of this cultural heritage, meaning the military objects from the Iron Curtain period. These pilot projects chose different assessment procedures for the cultural heritage of the Baltic Green Belt as well as two different contexts in which they were used for regional development: one was a cultural heritage assessment for spatial planning, the other one was for development of touristic products. The pilot projects were accompanied by research in order to identify valuable lessons learned and to give recommendations for further development of cultural heritage. Some of the main results were: The cultural heritage of the Green Belt is up to now hardly considered valuable by either decision makers or the general public; however, twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the willingness to talk about this period is growing, and there is a strong media interest to discuss this period publically; the assessments were carried out and documented very well for their purposes; in the pilot project, the European Green Belt initiative helped to integrate stakeholders from different backgrounds into a constructive dialogue about their region’s development. 115