Co-Creation and Cultural Ownership in Festival Procession Design: The Case of Phra Lab, Khon Kaen, Thailand

Sacred processions are among the most visible ways living cultural traditions persist today, yet many are threatened by declining community participation, standardized attendance, and a widening gap between ritual meaning and touristic spectacle. This study examines the Phra Lab procession, a merit-making ritual centered on a bronze Buddha image held annually during the Songkran Festival in Khon Kaen Province, Thailand. Using a qualitative case-study design combining in-depth interviews with 35 purposively sampled community leaders, officials, and cultural-tourism specialists, and a structured questionnaire administered on-site to 339 spectators and participants recruited through convenience sampling, the study finds that the procession’s own order of march encodes its participation problem: professional performers are placed at the front, drawing public attention, while community members and spectators remain at the rear, uncounted and without a distinct role, reflecting the tokenism level of participation independently identified through a stakeholder analysis using Arnstein’s ladder. This asymmetry is reflected in attitudes toward the event: community representatives rated management, atmosphere, and community/tourism benefits significantly lower than spectators and participants (all p < 0.05), suggesting those closest to organizing the event experience it differently from those who simply attend. Drawing on theories of invented tradition, cultural capital, and ritual communities, the study proposes a framework for co-creating the procession’s design with its own community: preserving authenticity and sacredness, embedding meaningful participation into the parade itself, communicating value through memorable experience, integrating community economic production through a circular, locally sourced supply chain for ceremonial materials, and treating design as iterative and measurable. This is operationalized through a five-stage participation process and a circular-economy system with a jointly administered benefit fund. The study contributes a transferable co-creation cultural ownership model for designing festival processions, with practical guidance for community-centered parade design in Southeast Asian heritage contexts.