Within a wider framework of fostering, safeguarding and promoting cultural heritage, British Council Lebanon has launched Situating Heritage aimed at consolidating the efforts and resources of cultural heritage professionals in Lebanon. In that sense, to formulate a clear and responsive strategy, British Council Lebanon in partnership with Biladi and Silāt for culture, has embarked on a situational analysis that maps and assesses, in accord with a cross-section of stakeholders, the needs and priorities of the sector, and attempts to reposition the Cultural Protection Fund as an opportunity to address the sector’s challenges and pacify the threats to cultural heritage.
The compounded repercussions of alarming political, social and economic crises since 2019 dictated the shaping of Situating Heritage into a prequel for an assessment and response strategy that dissects the state of the sector within the current context, maps its threats, prioritizes its needs, and defines the possible ways forward. In scope, the initiative proposed a series of programmatic components that bridge the general public’s notions of and concerns on cultural heritage with the extensive experience of practitioners to instigate contextualized responses, enlarge the pool of viewpoints and heighten the relevance of ownership of cultural heritage.