Managing Festivals in Tourism Product Development: The Case of Kiếp Bạc Festival, Vietnam

This chapter examines how governance architecture and spatial design mediate the authenticity-commodification nexus in Vietnam’s Kiếp Bạc Festival, advancing a managerial understanding of “living heritage” within festival tourism. A qualitative case-study design synthesizes earlier fieldwork with recent secondary materials, encompassing 331 interviews with festival organizers, local authorities, religious custodians, residents, and visitors from 2013-2017, alongside analysis of current plans, policies, media reports, and on-site practices. The analysis shows that authenticity is actively produced and safeguarded through a multi-tier subcommittee system, inter-agency inspection, and functional zoning that separates sacred, performance, and commercial precincts. These instruments yield high levels of objective, constructive, and existential authenticity while permitting regulated commodification (e.g., capped and free seal distribution, time-bounded public hầu đồng, vendor licensing, and price posting) to support livelihoods without desacralizing ritual cores. We theorize two linked constructs, governed authenticity and regulated performativity, to embed authenticity theory in concrete administrative procedures and space-use rules, thereby specifying meso-level mechanisms that connect stakeholder coordination to cultural and economic performance in festival tourism. Practically, the study offers a transferable blueprint for heritage-event management: codified zoning, authenticity charters, clear division of labor across specialized subcommittees, inspection and enforcement regimes, and monitoring systems that pair cultural and economic indicators. Integrating post-2025 UNESCO inscription developments, the evidence demonstrates that deliberate co-management of cultural authority, managerial design, market interfaces, and digital enhancements can sustain a “high-authenticity, medium-commodification” equilibrium in living heritage settings amid surging visitor numbers.