Requirements and Consequences of Cultural Policy-making in Lebanon Based on Qualitative Content Analysis

The purpose of the current study is to review requirements and consequences of Lebanon’s cultural policy-making, with respect to the ethnic and religious extensiveness in this country and to present useful information and analyses for the policy-makers who seek open cultural space and acknowledgement of different ethnic groups, sects, and cultures. The method of study is descriptive-analytic and in this regard, the main steps of the process of cultural policy-making in Lebanon as well as its effective criteria were reviewed. Then, using qualitative content analysis, the most important negative consequences of the process of cultural policy-making in Lebanon, such as inattention to spiritual aspects and purposes of people’s life in Lebanon, contradiction between objectives and means to implement policies, ambiguity and relativism in the procedures and stages of policymaking, pluralism, and intensification of secularism were extracted. It seems that using instructions from Lebanon’s cultural system as a model in the cultural policy-making of other countries, makes cultural policy-making impossible. However, in a macro or infrastructural outlook, some instructions of Lebanon’s cultural system can lead to betterment of the process of cultural policy-making in different stages. The necessity of utmost attention to different views, their acknowledgment, their impact on the prioritization and arrangement of policies, and making an effort to make the best use of them are among positive achievements of this approach.