Jeanette Snowball

Estimating the Marginal Utility of Different Sections of an Arts Festival: the Case of Visitors to the South African National Arts Festival

Abstract This paper applies choice experiments (CE) to value the utility visitors derive from various sections of the National Arts Festival held once a year in Grahamstown, South Africa. A brief survey of the method and its use to date in valuing cultural goods is provided. The CE conducted at the 2003 South African National Arts Festival is described. The results show that a conditional logit model performs very well in valuing Festival attributes and provides interesting insights into the value that different gender and ethnic groups place on the various elements of the Festival. Such detailed information can help organizers to allocate resources more efficiently; particularly in South Africa, where the emphasis is on attracting previously excluded sectors of the population to cultural events.

Cultural heritage routes in South Africa: Effective tools for heritage conservation and local economic development?

Protecting cultural heritage is a challenge for developing countries, particularly where heritage sites are widely spread in rural areas and may not include impressive buildings and monuments. A potential solution adopted by a growing number of these countries is to link small sites of mainly local significance into a cultural heritage route and market them as a package while also improving the management and conservation of heritage assets. The tourism potential of such routes is often emphasised in local economic development (LED) strategies, envisaged as providing revenue-generating opportunities for conserving heritage assets. This paper explores the potential for economic development and heritage conservation of the Liberation Heritage Route in South Africa. This project may have non-market value in protecting cultural capital, but financial and other LED benefits are unlikely to be forthcoming in the short run, which could jeopardise the sustainability of the heritage protection.

Interview versus self-completion questionnaires in discrete choice experiments

Since the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) panel (1993) on Contingent Valuation (CV), it has been accepted that Willingness to Pay (WTP) data should ideally be collected using only face-to-face interviews and not self-completion surveys. However, there has been little testing of the accuracy of Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) data collected using self-completion methods, which may actually produce more reliable results because of a reduction in interviewer bias and because respondents are given more time to think. This research, conducted at the South African National Arts Festival (NAF), compares the findings of face-to-face and self-completion surveys using a choice experiment eliciting the willingness of attenders to pay for various attributes of live theatre performances. Results show that attribute coefficients are consistently lower for the self-completion data than for the interview data and, for the model including interaction terms, have lower SEs for the majority of the coefficients. WTP estimates are also lower and, given ticket prices, more realistic, when using the self-completion data.

Physical Theatre consumption and the advent of the 'Festivore' : a case study of audience attendance at the South African National Arts Festival

Coupled with a decline in government and consumer support and disparity between value and funding of the arts, theatre companies in South Africa can no longer rely on external subsidies to finance productions (Visser 2005; Snowball & Willis 2006). Despite this apparent dilemma, the proliferation of festivals has provided a new means to support and even promote theatre in South Africa, reaching a newer audience that has extended from a small, loyal theatre-going exclusive to a vast, eclectic festival public. If one wants to find a cultural democratisation of theatre and the arts in South Africa then, one should not look at the old theatre establishments of the past, but rather look to festivals as a new and dynamic way theatre is being democratised and brought to the people - to the festinos (Van Graan 2007; Mahomed 2009).

The experiences of Fringe producers at the South African National Arts Festival: Production, profits and non-market benefits

Unlike the performing arts generally, festivals and special events have been growing in popularity worldwide: since the 1980s there has been an explosion of the number of festival of all types, not just arts festivals, but folk festivals, harvest festivals, food festivals, - the list is long. It is estimated that there are more than 300 festivals in the UK (British Federation of Festivals 2004), 1300 in Australia (Johnson et al 2005) and more than 5000 in the US (Blumenthal 2002).