A framework for the development of event public policy: Facilitating regional development

Abstract

Governments around the globe are utilising events as an integral part of their policies for regional development. Therefore, there is an increasing need to ensure event public policy has the capacity to facilitate opportunities for regional development. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for the development of public policy for regional events. The framework was conceived to address criticisms which emanated from the analysis of 219 event policies published from 1974to 2004 by nineteen Australian local governments. These criticisms suggested that the event policies contain redundant rhetoric, are ad hoc and reactive, are developed by an insular policy community and do not contain enough proactive, theoretically informed initiatives. Thus the framework was designed to provide a constructive foundation for local governments to collaboratively develop theoretically informed event policy which has the capacity to proactively develop strong and vibrant regions.