Routledge Due date August 2010

Event Policy: Journeys from Ritual to Regeneration

Professor David McGillivray, Chair in Event and Digital Cultures

University of the West of Scotland

@dgmcgillivray dgmcgillivray.posterous.com david.mcgillivray@uws.ac.uk

EVENT MANAGEMENT: A CRITIQUE

•  Uncritical and self-congratulatory

•  Unconcerned with notions of moral regulation

•  Myopic about generations of critical study in other fields on questions of power, control and resistance

•  Overly focused on the organisation, logistics, efficiency & risk management

WHY EVENTS DO MATTER?

They are, indisputably, of local, national and international importance

They are important signifiers of personal, community, national and

globalised identity

They are political and politicised, ritualistic and regenerative

They are written into history and can be utilised to alter it

They are planned and unplanned, small and large, sporting and

cultural, hallmark, special and ‘mega’

EVENTS: AN EMERGING FIELD OF STUDY

•  We need to ensure students (and practitioners) are exposed to stages2i & 3

•  Working from the belief that ‘events have policy implications that cannot be ignored and they are not the sole domain of event producers and managers’ (Getz, 2007: 3).

•  This requires a engagement with theoretical frames or ways of seeing the world

•  Developing its own ontological, epistemological and methodological commitments

Stage Characteristics 1. Events management (including production and design) Bowdin, Shone & Parry, Van de Wagen, Ritchie, Goldblatt, etc.

Instrumental Practical experience Operational/logistical Creative/technological Micro-level concerns Abundant literature

2. Events policy (Foley et al, 2009) Hall, Getz, Thomas, Veal, etc

Macro-level contextualisation Policy angle evident Social, cultural and economic effects (or impacts) of events considered Allocation of scarce resource for externalities Paucity of specialised literature

3. Events studies (Getz, 2007) Considers wider socio-historical context for events Macro-level concerns Informed by a range of academic disciplines Emerging literature

SIGNS OF PROGRESS?

EVENT POLICY PERSPECTIVES

•  Rationales •  Shift in form and function of events - ritualistic practices and markers tied closely to ideas of

time, space, community and the locality •  20th C - increasingly ‘planned’ and part of (economic) policy objectives

•  Now conceived and exploited for regenerative imperatives which venerate the new, the transitory, the contrived to secure a plethora of social, political and economic externalities

•  But, as ‘who gains’ & ‘who pays’ becomes open to public dialogue legitimation issues arise

•  Formations •  Neo-liberal, urban entrepreneurial governance ‘frames’ event policy objectives:

•  Events to be supported must align with destination brand and generate economic return (e.g. Glasgow: Scotland with Style)

•  Principal risks associated with events are borne by a highly active entrepreneurial (local) state, incentivising private sector involvement: •  But social & cultural ‘capital’ debates draw attention to inequality, marginalisation and social polarity (Smith, 2002) -

the ‘hard outcomes of neo-liberalism’:

•  Overestimated benefits, underestimated costs (Whitson & Horne, 2006); corporate and political elite beneficiaries

•  In the intense inter-urban competition to secure lucrative events, the power ratio between private capital, event owners (e.g. IOC, FIFA, UEFA) and local state in favour of the former

EVENT POLICY IMPLEMENTATIONS •  Glasgow 2014: Planned & governed to secure policy externalities or

‘legacy’ •  Dubai – Planned but with professed ‘openness’ on the basis of inbound

tourism •  Sport event visibility the key strategy •  Ruling family patronage and absence of need for democratic consent provides

competitive advantage in competition for global events

•  New Orleans Mardi Gras: Apparently ‘unplanned’ yet with desire for governance and planning •  Caught between ‘freedom’ – a laissez faire governance - and ‘regulation’ - the

desire for a more interventionist, micro management of the Mardi Gras celebrations

•  Singapore: Planned but with a focus on local ‘indigenous’ citizen involvement: •  Representative democracy exists (in name) but authoritarian approach to

governance •  Local festivity promoted but then used for global positioning (e.g. Chingay &

Thaipusam)

POLICY DIRECTIONS

•  you need to be able to understand, critique and programme for planned externalities, subtly

GOVERNED EVENTS & PLANNED EXTERNALITIES

CASE STUDY: LONDON2012

READING EVENTS AS ‘TEXTS’

CONCLUSIONS

•  Events are now, undoubtedly, a public policy tool and not just in the liberal democracies of the west offering access to the planned externalities that neo-liberal policy makers are seeking

•  Events (the circuses) represent a good news story in times of political, economic and social uncertainty, but to undermine the open, citizen-involved and fluid function of festivity threatens the very basis of the policy outcomes being sought

•  To succeed you need to be competent but critical; globally aware but locally connected and; self assured and not self-congratulatory…