Ar Dàimhean is Dualchas: Safeguarding Scotland’s Intangible Cultural Heritage

In June 2024, the UK Government ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Convention has virtually global coverage and provides an established framework for the protection of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). However, its status of ‘soft law’ means that states rely on domestic law, often copyright, to implement the requirements of the convention and provide meaningful guidance to their citizens on permitted uses of ICH. Currently, the UK has no legal framework to administer the convention as the 1988 Copyrights and Patents Act contains no provision for the protection of expressions of intangible heritage. This raises significant questions about the efficacy of ratification for Scotland and, crucially, what meaningful difference it will make at the community level.

This article reflects on the authors’ experience of running a series of community consultation workshops in Scotland with Historic Environment Scotland – Ar Daimhean is Dualchas / Our Relationships and Heritage – mainly focused in the Outer Hebrides, during the summer and autumn of 2023. These workshops highlighted that the traditional means of ICH transmission and preservation in these communities have not survived the changes brought about by economic migration, the generational absence of Gaelic in educational settings, technological changes, and the incoming of non-Gaelic speakers. The safeguarding initiatives across Scotland at the community level tend to be under-resourced, over-reliant on volunteers and lacking the infrastructure to ensure that ICH will be passed on to future generations. In this context, the ratification of the Convention presents an opportunity for Scotland to co-create processes for ICH safeguarding drawn from networks and examples of best practice that already exist within the country.

Scottish Affairs, Volume 34, Issue 4