Building resilience and understanding complexities of event project stakeholder management

This conceptual paper explores the nature of complexity management of event project stakeholders in festivals and events. Recent and ongoing Global factors have heightened an emphasis on resilience in the sector, including consideration of being embedded in organisational process, not only a planned response which is activated and deployed when needed. With no current research of complexity management in festivals and events, this research follows a sequential examination of complexity in three key academic fields – project management, stakeholder theory and event management – and the subsequent areas of overlap to arrive at the core intersection of event project stakeholders. This sequence reveals a number of key elements for consideration, each with corresponding characteristics which contrast along instrumental and normative lines providing a set of parameters for future consideration and research. By virtue of being temporary planned experiences with specific time constraints, festivals and events are a unique type of project. Stakeholders bring added complexity - should their goals not be well defined or emerge through the project cycle then uncertainty is introduced and complexity is assured. Furthermore, event stakeholder dynamics shift and change over the period of the project life cycle indicating the importance of time, timing and timely intervention. Whilst event management focuses on the chronological countdown to event day, stakeholders may follow their own timelines and trajectories presenting additional complexity and challenges for event producers and managers. This is demonstrated by a 3-dimensional representation to stimulate further research and modelling in the field of festival and events.