Local government being launched today activates local festivals as important means to establish local identity and enhance local image and local development. According to the data reported by Ministry of Cultures, Sports and Tourism, more than 1,000 l...
Local government being launched today activates local festivals as important means to establish local identity and enhance local image and local development. According to the data reported by Ministry of Cultures, Sports and Tourism, more than 1,000 local festivals are held in Korea. This indicates that local festivals play a significant role in a wide range of areas such as economic and social development as well as cultural effect such as development of local culture.
Local festivals, as general expressions of local culture, are space offered to effectively show and inherit local culture where community culture based on traditional culture such as history and culture of the area and life of local residents is expressed. Thus, local festivals unite local folks, create common value and lead cultural respond of folks to promote solidarity of local community and community spirit. Also, they become important means that may bring cultural development, enhancement of local image, development of the whole areas such as economy, politics, and society.
Although local festivals are considered important, they have a lot of problems in reality such as participation of folks as a mere formality, undiscriminated program running and more. Also. they do not function desirable for development of local economy and unity of folks. Thus, it is significant to reconsider the value of local festivals as strategic resources for local vitality and seek desirable development.
This study examined the development process and effect of Hampyeong Butterfly Festival and Geumsan Ginseng Festival and analyzed the problems and development plan from the approach in terms of content, operation and effect.
Each local government should invest in creative development of local culture resources and natural landscape to preserve them with local folks, develop local festivals that offers a variety of colorful attractions for many tourists, contribute to activated local development and economy and advertise the areas to others.
In other words, local government should attract visitors, impress them for revisit or word-of-mouth to lead the festivals to be succeeded. It would probably contribute to the activation of local economy.
To find the competitive activation plan for local economy through attraction of tourists and culture tourism marketing, local festival strategy should be established with a lot of improvement. Positive participation and cooperation of government as well as people are necessary to make efforts to globalize traditional culture, turn traditional culture resources into tourism products, and promote and develop previous festivals toward the world tourism festivals.