Social Value Creation in Art-Related Tourism Projects: The Role of Creative Project Actors in Diverse National and International Settings

To clarify the role of art and artists as creative actors in art-related tourism projects, the study focuses, from the perspective of social value creation, on art projects that are in the development stage and that aim to promote local sustainability.We propose a framework for comprehensive understanding the social value creation in terms of the service-dominant logic (SDL) theory. The framework applies eleven attributes organised in four (why-who-what-how) categories to obtain six kinds of insight into the project actors’ network ecosystem. The framework is applied to case studies from Japan: the ‘Kanazawa Creative Tourism’ (KCT) project in a cultural-heritage city, the ‘Kinokuni Train Art’ (KTA) project along a railway line running through a coastal area with rich natural resources, and similar projects in Slovenia. Through stakeholders’ interviews, field surveys and theoretical research we analyse and compare these projects in terms of the attributes of the proposed framework. The study provides insights towards identifying the major types of creatively involved actors of art-related tourism projects: mostly local artists and craftsmen, but also members involved mainly as collaboration generators and intermediaries operating at different integration levels. To validate the framework’s destination management insights in a broader international background, we refer in the discussion to similar examples with different cultural and geographical backgrounds and/ormaturity level from Slovenia, an eu country.