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The majority of the population in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) lives in urban areas. In the year 2030, the percentage of the rural population is expected to be 14% in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 11% in the United Arab Emirates, 10% in Oman, 9% in Bahrain, 1% in Qatar, and will remain 0% in Kuwait. Like many other countries, however, GCC countries continue to invest efforts and resources toward their national agendas aimed at sustainable development. In this context, smart villages are of special interest as, increasingly, they serve as the crossroads between urban living and rural life embracing history, culture, tradition, spiritual values, and human capital. The objective of this chapter is to explore actions taken toward the development of smart villages in the GCC countries, with a comparative overview on pertaining approaches and strategies; challenges related to the implementation of these actions are identified. It is demonstrated that despite GCCs’ tremendous efforts toward developing infrastructure in urban centers, more infrastructure investment is needed with regard to key issues related to developing remote areas – including their smart networks, digital facilities, and e-governance. It is also highlighted that more research is needed, especially on issues related to the transformation of villages into smart villages, including the need for holistic approaches, policies, and strategies toward smart villages.

Smart village may be a new, and for that matter a rather fancy, concept, yet the thrust of problems and challenges that it speaks to is by no means trivial or new. Hence the imperative inherent in the smart village concept and debate is to diagnose the status quo, propose viable ways of addressing problems and challenges, build consensus about the need to take action, and to actually follow the suit at micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels. The concept of smart village made its inroad into the policymaking and academic debates nearly simultaneously, thus suggesting that a window of opportunity exists to undertake concerted action in view of revitalizing rural areas, and so villages, across the European Union. This chapter offers an insight into the conceptual and empirical caveats and opportunities the concept and, indeed, approach termed ‘smart villages’ brings about. To this end, the genealogy and the relevance of the concept and the approach are discussed. Against this background, the content of the entire volume is elaborated. A few final remarks follow.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process of internationalization of higher education (HE) in the United Arab Emirates by examining the development of its HE system, and analyzing the components and results of internationalization.

The study adopts a qualitative research methodology to analyze primary evidence from interviews with academics in the UAE, and uses documents and archival research as secondary evidence to provide a comprehensive view of the UAE’s internationalized HE sector. A review of the literature is undertaken to inform discussion and analysis which focuses on the internal and external environments of the UAE. A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis identifies the benefits and challenges for the UAE of internationalized HE.

The study finds that internationalization of HE in the UAE has grown rapidly in the last decade, and that the UAE has sought to establish and promote itself as an “education hub” in the Middle East. However, this may subsume the government’s parallel goal of educating its citizenry to the level of skills necessitated by globalization. Three major forces promoting internationalization in the UAE are neoliberalism, quality assurance, and imported internationalization, an approach seeks the prestige conferred by international accreditation that is predominant in the UAE as well as other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states. An area of concern is the governance of systems to ensure high quality for universities that may be state-owned, privately owned, or international branch campuses. The study concludes that regional integration could provide the way forward for these countries in their internationalization efforts, not by standardizing but by better formulating study programs across the range of state, private and international higher education institutions.

The study has important implications for HE policy and governance in the development of internationalized HE in the UAE. It provides theoretical perspectives with practical implications, focusing on some of the critical issues in this developing field for HE administrators and practitioners alike. It also has implications for the UAE’s national social values and cultural identity. This may be a reflection of the UAE’s relatively recent unification as a state whose HE system, developed to skill its population, has been overtaken by the imperative to compete in a globalized world. The research is limited by the absence of longitudinal data to review longer-term outcomes.

The UAE, like other GCC countries, is striving to take its higher educational system to a higher level of performance. This study can be considered as one of the very few studies in the area of the internationalization of HE in the UAE. It contributes to the HE literature by identifying factors and circumstances that facilitate, and hinder, the development of internationalization of HE in the UAE. Globalization can be considered as one of the history’s most significant social processes, and the HE sector plays a vital role in the delivery of knowledge and skills to societies, and thus its socio-economic development.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efforts undertaken by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in deploying renewable energy (RE), in terms of capacity assessments, research and development activities, and current and planned projects. The paper also aims to investigate the drivers and barriers for the diffusion of RE technologies in the GCC.

The paper provides a literature‐based study on the status of the RE sector in the GCC, including capacities, projects, policies and frameworks in the GCC, in addition to an analysis of the main drivers and barriers to RE deployment arising from the literature.

The results of this paper illustrate growing interest in renewable energy in the GCC countries at the R&D and project implementation level.

The paper contributes by the provision of the latest knowledge on the status of the RE sector in the GCC and by highlighting the most significant drivers fuelling RE deployment, as well as the barriers currently hindering the greater diffusion of RE technologies in the region.

In as much as it is contested, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also unexplored, underdiscussed, and, as a result, misunderstood. Frequently viewed through the lens of international relations and global economy, the diverse dimensions of collaboration, including business and research-industry clusters, that BRI enhances, tend to be excluded from the analysis. In a similar manner, the role of the Arab Peninsula in the grand strategy underpinning BRI and its implementation is rarely discussed. BRI is a forward-oriented initiative, an attempt to reap benefits of developments and circumstances that are only nascent. This bears two potent implications. First, as China attempts to influence the context in which it operates, it is subject to change itself; the Chinese business sector evolution attests to that. Second, some of China’s not so obvious partners of today, including those in the Arab Peninsula, are about to turn into key interlocutors of tomorrow. BRI taps into opportunities thus created. This chapter elaborates on these issues and, against this backdrop, outlines how the remaining chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.

In offering reflections on key themes affecting sustainability in the Middle East, this paper explores how an imprecise concept such as sustainability can, co-constituted with other powerful political and economic systems, such as nation building, drive forward new agendas for urban development. Rather than focus on specific empirical findings, the paper reflects instead on some of the assumptions underpinning competing approaches to sustainability highlighting multiple alternate visions of urban sustainability. In doing so, the paper engages with the literature on sustainability, master-planning and real estate development inviting the reader in the process to think about and ponder on the role of vision in the process. The reader is therefore invited to consider the aggregate impact of individual master planned projects on the urban fabric of fast growing cities and to think about how projects such as Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and the Msheireb downtown redevelopment in Doha demonstrate how sustainability and nationalist discourses are intertwined offering competing visions of what a sustainable city might become while at the same time hiding urban inequalities in plain sight with the help of the ‘forward looking’ facade of sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to examine social sustainability effectiveness of eco-cities through the case of Masdar City’s strategy for urban sustainability in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Using a case study approach, the paper is an exploratory, qualitative analysis, which investigates the social, environmental and economic performance of Masdar City, a purported carbon-neutral, zero-waste urban development.

Though Masdar City substantively contributes to innovation in sustainable urban development within environmental and economic contexts and has been effective in capital circulation in green technology markets, the impetus as a commercially driven enterprise is most evident. Successful sustainable urban development requires greater consideration for the social imperative.

Eco-city mega-projects, such as Masdar City, have the potential to fuse achievements in innovation, technology and economic enterprise with the social imperative of functional urban habitats.

Eco-cities are of increasing interest given the growing need for sustainable, energy-efficient living. This paper contributes through a novel case study, exploring how the concept of the eco-city has been developed and understood in the Masdar City context and discusses successes and deficits in its strategic implementation.