Over recent years, the term “creative industries” has made a remarkable journey: from an academic concept debated in Western universities to one of the most frequently cited ideas in development policy across the Arab Gulf. It now appears regularly in national strategies, ministerial speeches, and entrepreneurship support programmes, positioned as a promising pathway to economic diversification and sustainable growth.
Gulf states are actively competing to grow the creative economy’s contribution to GDP, investing in initiatives to support creators, entrepreneurs, and emerging creative communities. But this growing enthusiasm raises a question that often goes unasked: where did this concept actually come from? Creative industries is not an idea that originated in the region. It is a concept born in Western contexts that travelled across continents to the Gulf, carrying with it specific assumptions about culture, creativity, and economic value.
This article poses a question that is rarely asked directly: which version of the “creative industries” concept actually arrived here? What did we take from it? And what changed when it made the journey from Western to Gulf contexts?
From Critical Philosophy to Economic Policy
The roots of the creative industries concept stretch back to intellectual debates that were, in their earliest form, more critical than celebratory. The term “culture industry” notably in the singular first appeared in the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947 (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997). The choice of the singular was not incidental: it pointed to a unified cultural system in which artistic works are produced according to the logic of the market, eroding aesthetic distinction and reducing culture to a mass-consumed commodity. The term was a critical tool for understanding cultural transformation, not a positive description of an economic sector.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the concept underwent an important shift. The move from “culture industry” to “cultural industries” in the plural reflected a recognition of the diversity of cultural activities and the different models through which they are produced and consumed, from publishing and music to film and television (Hesmondhalgh, 2018; O’Connor, 2010).
Then came the defining moment: 1998, when the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published its landmark mapping document defining “creative industries” as activities that “have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998).
This definition emerged within a broader project advanced by Tony Blair’s government to reposition the British economy moving away from traditional manufacturing towards creativity and knowledge as engines of growth. What gave the concept its extraordinary capacity to spread was its dual appeal: it spoke at once to those who valued culture as a social and symbolic good, and to those focused on economic growth and job creation.
Flew (2012) documented how the concept became a compelling policy reference point, adopted by governments around the world and reinterpreted to fit their own development priorities. As the economic evidence mounted, its appeal to policymakers only grew. UNESCO reports indicate that cultural and creative industries generate around $2.3 trillion annually and account for approximately 6.2% of global employment, figures that gave the creative economy discourse considerable weight in policy circles.
The Rentier Economy and the Creativity Paradox
There is a striking paradox in how Gulf states have embraced the creative industries discourse. They are working to build knowledge-based, creative economies for the post-oil era while much of this transformation continues to be funded by oil revenues. This does not undermine the ambition, but it gives the Gulf experience a particular character that deserves careful analysis.
The theory of the “rentier state,” developed by Beblawi and Luciani (Beblawi & Luciani, 1987), helps explain one dimension of this character. Unlike the Western contexts in which the creative industries concept emerged where momentum often came from cultural actors, market shifts, and civil society the shift towards the creative economy in Gulf states has been driven largely by state visions and national strategies, with governments setting the priorities, defining the sectors, and directing the investments.
This points to a distinct model that might be called the “State-led Creative Economy” one that is still evolving and that merits much closer study to understand its characteristics, opportunities, and structural challenges.
The motivation, moreover, extends beyond economic diversification. Gulf states have recognised that creative industries alongside major museums, cultural festivals, and arts events can serve a purpose far beyond direct economic returns. They become instruments for strengthening international presence, reshaping national narratives, and building cultural influence on the global stage (Nye, 2004). This dynamic goes a long way towards explaining the momentum that creative industries have gained across the region’s development plans in recent years.
The Gulf: Different Approaches, One Direction
Gulf states share a common orientation positioning creative industries as a vehicle for economic diversification but the paths they have taken vary considerably.
In the UAE, Abu Dhabi invested in building a global cultural profile by attracting major international institutions, most notably the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2017. Dubai, meanwhile, focused on developing specialised creative clusters to draw in talent and companies working across creative sectors an approach that resonates with ideas Richard Florida put forward in The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002). In 2021, these efforts converged in the UAE’s National Creative Industries Strategy, which targets the sector’s contribution reaching 5% of GDP by 2031.
In Saudi Arabia, the pace of change has been extraordinary. The lifting of the cinema ban in 2018 and the rapid expansion of the entertainment and gaming sectors have repositioned the Kingdom as a destination for some of the world’s largest tournaments and events in these fields. Qatar, for its part, has invested in building a comprehensive cultural and institutional infrastructure the Museum of Islamic Art, the National Museum, and the M7 Design and Innovation Hub while the creative industries contributed over 20 billion Qatari riyals to the national economy in 2021.
What deserves reflection, however, is not the figures or the projects themselves, but what they reveal about the underlying development model: large-scale investment in cultural and creative infrastructure, alongside an open question about when these investments will translate into genuinely vibrant and self-sustaining creative ecosystems ones capable of generating cultural and economic value from within, rather than depending on high-profile institutions and flagship venues.
What the Gulf Borrowed and What It Left Behind
This is where the most important questions lie questions that go beyond tracking initiatives and statistics to understanding the nature of the model that has actually been adopted.
What was borrowed with considerable enthusiasm is primarily the economic dimension of the creative industries discourse: the language of growth, GDP contribution, job creation, and creative entrepreneurship, alongside the use of culture and creativity as instruments of soft power and international positioning.
By contrast, certain other elements of the concept appear less present in the Gulf experience. In many Western contexts, the creative industries emerged alongside broader debates about cultural autonomy, cultural diversity, and the role of grassroots, bottom-up cultural initiatives. The Gulf experience has largely unfolded within state-directed frameworks that define priorities from above. And the focus has fallen more heavily on the economic and developmental dimensions of the concept than on the cultural and political debates that accompanied its evolution in its original contexts.
This is not to suggest that one model is inherently better than the other. Rather, it points to how the concept has been reinterpreted and adapted to fit the economic, social, and political conditions of the region. What we are witnessing today is not a replication of the Western model, but a distinct Gulf version of creative industries one that brings together economic diversification objectives, a central role for the state, and the ambition to strengthen international cultural presence.
This model might be described as a form of “directed creative economy,” in which the state plays a central role in planning, investing, and building cultural and creative infrastructure. The experiences of countries like Singapore and South Korea show that there is more than one viable path to building a successful creative economy. But the success of any model ultimately depends on its capacity to strike a sustainable balance between economic growth and a genuine environment that enables creativity, innovation, experimentation, and a diversity of cultural voices.
Oman: A Case Still Taking Shape
In the Omani context, these dynamics take on their own particular features ones I have followed closely, both as a researcher and as a practitioner in this field.
Although the terms “cultural and creative industries” and “creative economy” did not appear explicitly in Oman Vision 2040, their substance was present within the goals of economic diversification and cultural identity. The clearer rhetorical shift came in 2021 with the launch of the Cultural Strategy (2021–2040), which adopted these concepts directly within a comprehensive national framework. This was followed by the inclusion of a “Creative Economy Enhancement Project” in the Tenth Five-Year Development Plan.
On the ground, recent years have seen a number of significant initiatives led by the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Youth. Among the most notable is the Cultural and Creative Industries Mapping Project alongside development workshops conducted in partnership with the Nazdahr programme, which resulted in investment projects valued at approximately OMR 15.4 million and additional investment opportunities exceeding OMR 19 million.
Several Omani initiatives have also attracted international recognition. The UNCTAD Creative Economy Outlook 2024 highlighted promising examples, including the Omani Frankincense Producers Empowerment Project and the Innovation in Palm Leaf Crafts Competition, as models for how cultural heritage and traditional crafts can create new economic opportunities within the framework of the contemporary creative economy.
That said, structural challenges remain. The absence of specialised data and statistics limits the scope for evidence-based planning. Intellectual property frameworks still require development to keep pace with the demands of the creative economy. And education and training in the sector remain at early stages relative to the scale of national ambitions.
These challenges cannot be addressed through strategies alone. What is needed is a comprehensive ecosystem encompassing education, training, financing, and legislation alongside genuine institutional recognition of creative professions as legitimate career pathways, not merely cultural pursuits or individual hobbies. The success of a creative economy is not measured by the number of initiatives or the volume of investment alone, but by its capacity to build a sustainable environment in which creators can turn their ideas, talents, and skills into projects, products, and services that generate cultural and economic value in equal measure.
Conclusion
The journey of the “creative industries” concept from the corridors of critical theory to Gulf policy documents reveals more than the movement of an idea across geographies. It reveals how concepts are borrowed, reinterpreted, and adapted to fit the priorities and circumstances of each society. Ideas do not travel unchanged; they acquire new meanings and produce different models of policy and practice.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Gulf experience is that creative industries have been embraced not merely as an economic sector, but as an instrument for diversification, international repositioning, and the cultivation of soft power. Yet realising these ambitions requires more than strategies, investments, and cultural infrastructure. It requires environments that genuinely nurture creativity, innovation, and experimentation and that empower local creators as central actors in development, not simply as its beneficiaries.
What makes this moment particularly worth watching is that the contours of this model are still being drawn. Gulf states are neither replicating Western experiences nor necessarily following the same trajectory. They are working to forge their own approaches to culture, creativity, and economy. The region is, for this reason, a significant laboratory for understanding how ideas travel across borders and how they are reshaped to generate new development pathways in contexts very different from those that gave rise to them.
For me, this interaction between policy, culture, and creativity between what is borrowed and what is reimagined locally remains one of the most compelling questions in the field, and one I continue to pursue in both research and practice, across Oman and the Arab Gulf.
References
- Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1997). Dialectic of enlightenment. Verso.
- Beblawi, H., & Luciani, G. (Eds.). (1987). The rentier state. Croom Helm.
- DCMS. (1998). Creative industries mapping document. Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
- Flew, T. (2012). The creative industries: Culture and policy. SAGE.
- Flew, T., & Cunningham, S. (2010). Creative industries after the first decade of debate. The Information Society, 26(2), 113–123.
- Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. Basic Books.
- Hesmondhalgh, D. (2018). The cultural industries (4th ed.). SAGE.
- Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics. PublicAffairs.
- O’Connor, J. (2010). The cultural and creative industries: A literature review (2nd ed.). Creativity, Culture and Education.
- UNCTAD. (2024). Creative economy outlook 2024. United Nations.