ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book showed how music festivals, seemingly trivial and ephemeral, perhaps even exotic and exclusive, or merely a source of pleasure and entertainment, can have a significant influence within small communities and can play a valuable, although sometimes contested, role in contributing to regional development. The role of festivals is symbolic of the 'post-productivist' countryside, where wheat and sheep are no longer so important, gradually being replaced by the creative arts, gastronomy and tourism. It argued the economic qualities of music festivals as culturally, spatially and temporally produced, to explore how the regional development potential of music festivals is embedded in a wider cultural politics of place and identity, and to reflect on music festivals in light of debates about what kind of regional economic development strategies rural places ought to pursue.
