Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Role Of Festivals In Drought-Affected Australian Communities, Christopher R. Gibson, John Connell

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Event management research increasingly recognizes place embeddedness as critical to success. Less well understood is the significance of the festivals and events sector in places suffering from environmental crises. A major empirical survey of 480 festivals in rural Australia, conducted in 2008 at the height of the Millennium Drought, elucidates the role and significance of festivals under conditions of extreme environmental stress. It centers on a qualitative analysis of responses to open-ended questions on the impacts of that drought. Over 70% of participating festival and event managers indicated that their community had suffered from drought, while 43% cited drought as …