GCDN Annual Convening – Doha 2026

Over the past five decades, Qatar has invested in cultural infrastructure – both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’' – as part of a long-term strategy to diversify the economy, underpin and celebrate national identity, cultivate talent, shape public space, and position the country as an active participant in global cultural exchange.

In this opening session, Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani will describe how Qatar is building its cultural ecosystem, where some common assumptions miss the mark, and the challenges and opportunities ahead. In conversation with Adrian Ellis, Her Excellency will reflect on the considerations behind major investments, the links between culture and place, infrastructure and community, and the local and global forces that shape cultural life – setting the scene for our wider explorations over the days ahead.

Legacy is often spoken about as something that comes later, assessed in hindsight once a project is delivered or a chapter closes. In practice, it is shaped much earlier through a steady accumulation of choices made in the present. It is not something that arrives at the end. It is constantly being made.

Opening a second day of conversations, this plenary looks at legacy as the connection between today’s choices and tomorrow’s publics – a collective effort of policy and stewardship beyond personal imprint. What gets set early and becomes hard to undo? How do decisions about mandate, governance, investment priorities, partnerships, talent, and the everyday relationship between institutions and public life shape what endures, what fades, and what others inherit? In places where cultural ambition moves fast, what must still move slowly if the work is meant to last? And how do leaders build continuity in ways that leave room for the next generation – not simply invited in once the story is written, but involved early, with real agency to help write it?

In other words, how can cultural and civic leaders act today to foster the legacy of tomorrow?

Culture connects people to places, to ideas, and to each other. It’s one of the few ways a society keeps talking to itself when so much else pulls it apart. Leadership, among other things, means taking responsibility for fostering those connections. That is becoming harder. Connection seems increasingly transactional, visibility often outweighs depth, and trust is harder to earn than attention. Leaders feel the pressure to respond quickly, be present everywhere, and prove relevance at all times.

This plenary asks what it takes to lead a cultural institution in 2026. How do you create enough consensus and momentum to move an organisation forward when trade-offs are real and scrutiny is constant? What do you owe to continuity, to stakeholders, to mission and values, and to staff, and what happens when those obligations collide? Are the expanded roles our organisations have taken on still the right ones? As societal and economic stresses grow, do we narrow our ambitions or set them more clearly and push harder? Which tensions have to be held rather than solved?