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PurposeThis paper presents participants' experiences of the collaborative process. The paper introduces the World Heritage Site and presents the central learning outcomes of a process through which researchers and practitioners sought to develop an empirically-grounded, site-specific and practice-led research agenda relevant to World Heritage management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach to improving collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the World Heritage field.Design/methodology/approachFrom September 2021 to April 2022, a research-practice team comprised of social scientists and managers of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Norway participated in a capacity-building pilot initiative under the ICCROM-IUCN World Heritage Leadership programme. Bringing researchers and practitioners together in a joint collaborative process, the Heritage Place Lab (HPL) pilot programme aimed to function as an incubator for developing research agendas for World Heritage Sites.FindingsThe paper demonstrates that close collaboration between heritage researchers and practitioners can benefit World Heritage Sites, offering managers valuable inputs for informed and inclusive decision-making. In the case of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, an improved understanding of the diversities in local values would benefit management, as existing management issues underpin the site's complexity. Furthermore, fruitful collaborations between heritage researchers and World Heritage managers depend on an overlapping and reflexive understanding of central concepts. This can be achieved through collaborative research-practice processes but is likely to require careful time management.Originality/valueFocussing on the collaborative process between World Heritage researchers and practitioners, and using additional information for comparable World Heritage examples obtained online, this paper shows how research interests and management challenges can be developed and aligned more successfully through cooperation and improved communication over time. Beyond the specific results for the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, the broader discussion presented on the challenges and importance of addressing the complexities of managing heritage sites will be valuable for other World Heritage Sites and managers.

The Scandinavian Peregrine Falcon Falco peregrinus population went through a severe population bottleneck during the second half of the twentieth century, and was almost extinct during the 1970s. This event may have reduced the amount of genetic variation in the population. With this background, a comparative study, using multilocus, minisatellite DNA fingerprinting, was carried out on broods of the Peregrine Falcon, the Merlin Falco columbarius and the Eurasian Hobby Falco subbuteo from south‐east Norway. Band‐sharing analysis of DNA fingerprints was used to test whether broods of Peregrine Falcons showed a greater between‐nest similarity in their fingerprint profiles than did broods of the two congeneric species breeding in the same region, which have not undergone any recent population bottlenecks. The results show that broods of Peregrine Falcons were significantly more similar to each other genetically than were broods of either Merlins or Eurasian Hobbies. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between the similarity in minisatellite DNA and the similarity in a set of 11 microsatellite loci analysed for a subset of the Peregrine Falcon samples. The correlation supports the assumption that minisatellite fingerprints provide a reliable indicator of overall genetic similarity, i.e. relatedness, between breeding pairs in the population. Hence we can conclude that broods of Peregrine Falcons were genetically more related to each other than were broods of the other two species. The high similarity in minisatellite DNA between broods indicates a loss of genetic variation in the Peregrine Falcon population caused by the bottleneck, but this explanation can only be verified through a comparative genetic study of individuals sampled before and after the bottleneck event.