With regard to cultural heritage, the mission of the Ministry of Culture is to ensure the safekeeping of cultural heritage and proper depository conditions for cultural goods by means of a legal basis, a protective organisation structure, methodological foundations and a system of national measures.

Nowadays, cultural space does not have any fixed boundaries. All activities concerning cultural heritage play a certain educational, regional and socio-political role. Today, cultural heritage conservation projects are not just purely technical (i.e. conservation-centred). Their objectives are much broader and have a social tendency – to develop local cultural identity, to encourage local people to participate in and to increase their knowledge about the value of cultural heritage; to promote local economical life through cultural heritage; to create new partnership relations (between different communities and on an international level). Safekeeping is an active process and it is essential to find answers to such questions as "Why are we preserving these things?" and "Who are we preserving them for?"

The protection of cultural heritage on national level was thoroughly reorganised in 2002: the Department of Cultural Heritage was set up within the Ministry of Culture. The task of the Department is to co-ordinate issues in the field of libraries, museums and cultural heritage.

Rearrangements resulted in a new cultural heritage conservation environment where a unitary management system was applied to cultural heritage, museum pieces and national documents. The new Heritage Conservation Act came into force on 1 April 2002. Based on the amended act, the National Heritage Conservation Board (between 1998-2002 the National Heritage Inspectorate) was re-established with the task of co-ordinating cultural heritage work under the Ministry’s governance. The Board has a lot more opportunities to develop cultural heritage policy than the Inspectorate, which mainly engaged in monitoring and control. At present, 24.701 monuments have been granted national cultural heritage protection.

The major initiatives in the field of cultural heritage are "Schools in Old Manors – Preservation of the Cultural-Historical Complex and Turning it into a Modern Learning Environment".  This programme aims to turn schools located in former manor houses into modern regional education and culture centres, thus ensuring that the historical manor houses and cultural heritage contained in them are preserved.

There is a separate national programme for Estonian churches - "Safekeeping and Development of Churches". The objective of this programme is to promote churches as guradians of constructed, cultural and art-historical heritage as well as to develop monitoring, research and publication activities.

The "Setumaa cultural programme" initiated in 2003 is a national programme aiming to support the cultural activity of Setu people who have a unique language and cultural heritage and live in four parishes of South-eastern Estonia.

As for libraries, a preservation strategy for national printed documents was developed in 2001.
In 2004, implementation of the national strategy of digitisation of cultural heritage (2004-2007) began under the co-ordination of the Ministry of Culture.

• The National Heritage Board
• State programmes
• Protecting Cultural Heritage in Times of Armed Conflict