Arts festivals, urban tourism and cultural policy

Arts festivals, framed within an array of neo-liberal, culture-led urban regeneration strategies, are now a mainstay of urban tourism and urban policy-making. As such, they face growing competitive pressures and competing agendas, and the need for a set of coherent goals and policy frameworks is vital. While a review of the literature clearly shows that arts festivals can deliver a series of benefits that separately meet cultural policy and urban tourism policy objectives, there is little to suggest that cities normatively engage in comprehensive, integrated policymaking for urban arts festivals. With a particular focus on recent developments in Ireland, this paper critically reviews a range of literature to investigate how arts festivals further cultural policy and tourism policy objectives in urban contexts. It argues that current conceptualisations of arts festivals within urban policy frameworks are imbalanced. While the proliferation of arts festivals signals expansion for the sector, the ready transferability of arts festivals into tourist attractions and city image-makers raises the prospect of a new dichotomy within a city's supply of artistic offerings, with the visible and instantly appealing, being more likely to prosper through a variety of public funding, public-private ventures and private sponsorship arrangements, than other cultural organisations with less potential for spectacle. The paper concludes, by arguing, that common bases for collaboration need to be identified between the arts festivals and tourism sectors, and that these need to be conceptualised within the broader cultural and urban policy arenas in which arts festivals are now firmly implicated.