Abstract
Tourism over the years has been viewed as an imperative industry as far as development and economic growth is concerned. In light of this, the relevance and importance of rural tourism festivals in both the global North and global South have been well-documented in the literature. However, scholarship in the global South context has since fallen behind in comparison. This is despite the fact that rural festivals have been regarded as a vehicle for local economic development (LED) in rural destinations. Therefore, this study aimed to assess stakeholder perceptions of rural tourism festival impacts, using the Kingdom of Eswatini as a case study. Through a convergent parallel mixed-method research design, a questionnaire survey was administered to festival attendees (n=373) as well as interviews (10) with key informants.
The findings show that attendees perceive rural festivals to have substantial impacts on the local destination. However, findings show that there is a lack of infrastructure development, which hinders the potential of festivals to be optimally used for LED. Despite this setback, attendees perceive festivals to be an avenue to enhance LED and largely support local tourism businesses. Findings further show increased economic activity during the festival, providing economic opportunities for local tourism businesses. The study makes recommendations through reflections on the theoretical framework for more collaborations amongst the network of actants and stakeholders. Such collaboration is envisaged to yield effective leveraging of rural festival impacts beyond just the festival period and space.