Community's Support for Local Cultural Festivals: The Role of Value Orientation toward Intangible Cultural Heritage

The relationship between attitudes of local community toward and support for local cultural festivals can be understood by Social Exchange Theory (SET)(Nunkoo & So, 2015a), whereby people who benefit from these festivals will also tend to support them. However, according to Li, Wan and Uysal (2019), there are limits to how well SET accounts for community’s support for local cultural festivals. The way in which community think about development of local cultural festivals is influenced by several factors (Getz, 2010) such as value orientation (Sharpley, 2014). Therefore, for destinations such as the UAE, that have rich intangible heritage, community’s value orientations toward Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) likely influence attitudes of local community toward local cultural festivals. Therefore, this study evaluates the value orientations of local community in the UAE toward ICH, and how such orientations might affect the SET explanations of local community attitudes and support toward development of local cultural festivals.