New perspectives on World Heritage management in the GCC legislation

Abstract

New legislative acts on heritage protection have been published in several Arab Countries in the last decade. Whilst this is a positive trend in general, what remains to be seen is the factual impact of the new legislation on the pressing issues of heritage management, including the holistic and integrated approaches, monitoring, enforcement and others. This paper compares the new legislative solutions from Gulf Arab Countries to the older ones and determines whether the new trends have potential of improving the heritage management systems. The findings of this paper are intended to increase the awareness of the still-marginal issue of heritage management in the heritage legislation of Arab region and promote the successful measures among the countries with outdated statutory heritage protection.