1. Event Policy: Journeys from Ritual to
Routledge
Regeneration
Due date August 2010
Professor David McGillivray, Chair in Event
and Digital Cultures
University of the West of Scotland
@dgmcgillivray
dgmcgillivray.posterous.com
david.mcgillivray@uws.ac.uk

2. 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

3. WHY EVENTS DO MATTER?
They are, indisputably, of local, national and international importance

4. They are important signifiers of personal, community, national and
globalised identity

5. They are political and politicised, ritualistic and regenerative

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

7. They are planned and unplanned, small and large, sporting and
cultural, hallmark, special and ‘mega’

8. EVENTS: AN EMERGING FIELD OF STUDY
• We need to ensure students (and Stage Characteristics
practitioners) are exposed to 1. Events management (including Instrumental
production and design) Practical experience
stages2i & 3
Bowdin, Shone & Parry,Van de Operational/logistical
• Working from the belief that Wagen, Ritchie, Goldblatt, etc. Creative/technological
‘events have policy implications Micro-level concerns
Abundant literature
that cannot be ignored and they
2. Events policy (Foley et al, Macro-level contextualisation
are not the sole domain of event 2009) Policy angle evident
producers and managers’ (Getz, Hall, Getz,Thomas,Veal, etc Social, cultural and economic
2007: 3).
effects (or impacts) of events
considered
• This requires a engagement with Allocation of scarce resource
theoretical frames or ways of for externalities
seeing the world
Paucity of specialised literature
• Developing its own ontological, 3. Events studies (Getz, 2007) Considers wider socio-
epistemological and historical context for events
Macro-level concerns
methodological commitments
Informed by a range of
academic disciplines
Emerging literature

9. SIGNS OF
PROGRESS?

11. 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

12. 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)

13. POLICY DIRECTIONS
• you need to be able to understand, critique and
programme for planned externalities, subtly
GOVERNED EVENTS & PLANNED EXTERNALITIES

14. CASE STUDY:
LONDON2012
READING EVENTS AS ‘TEXTS’

15. 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…