Correspondence: Janne J. Liburd, Institut for Fagsprog, Kommunikation og Informationsvidenskab, Syddansk Universitet, Niels Bohrs Vej 9, Esbjerg DK-6700, Denmark. E-mail: liburd@sitkom.sdu.dk Website: http://web.sdu.dk/liburd/

¹is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Tourism, Culture and Innovation at the University of Southern Denmark. She is a cultural anthropologist, and her research interests are in the field of sustainable tourism development. She has published on national park development, heritage tourism, cruise tourism, tourism innovation, tourism crisis communication, corporate social responsibility, NGOs and democratic accountability in the Eastern Caribbean. She has conducted a number of research projects relating to competence development for tourism practitioners and tourism educators. She is the chair of the B.E.S.T. Education Network, and Associate Professor at the Institute of Business Communication and Information Science.

²graduated in April 2008 at the Wageningen University for her Doctoral thesis entitled 'The Politics of Rural Governance, Case studies of rural partnerships in the Netherlands and Wales'. She continued to work at the Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University as a teacher/researcher. She is involved in action research with Dutch local rural development stakeholders, where she studies how social capital can be build up and sustained over time. She also works on an EC-funded FP7 project: 'Assessing the impact of rural development policies (including LEADER)'.

Received 13 January 2009; Revised 13 January 2009.

Abstract

This paper sets out to probe how a cultural festival can enhance quality of life (QoL) and identifies possible drivers in the process. The Wadden Sea Festival in Denmark is based on the idea of integrating the coastal environment in the presentation of contemporary art. Specifically, unique tidal differences are utilised to stage a range of performances. The Wadden Sea Festival was designed to create regional, national and international liaisons between artists and cultural institutions and to enhance local residents' sense of place and collective identity while also attracting visitors to the region. Recognising the articulated aims of the festival, we explore how a cultural festival, and more specifically contemporary art, may positively influence the QoL of participants, residents and visitors alike. Participant-observation and in-depth interviews formed the basis for this exploratory research. We elicit and illustrate how the festival generated feelings of positive energy and integrity among individual artists and discuss these elements in relation to theoretical conceptualisations of QoL. Adopting a highly contextualised and qualitative approach, we argue that emic perspectives are needed to understand the immaterial elements of QoL. Further, an emic approach allows for deep narratives and opens up for multidimensional perspectives that could be applied in different cultural settings.