2021 年 17 巻 2 号 p. 1-16
Event leveraging implies that if an event is expected to deliver the espoused benefits, a more strategic approach, which considers in advance how host communities can derive sustainable legacy from the event, must be adopted. A previous study has reported extensive findings of how a single city-based international sporting event can impact the host community. However, such impact has not been verified for a wide-area sporting event involving multiple cities; moreover, research on small host cities is limited. Therefore, this study aimed to clarify the formation process of community capacity in the pre-event staging of the 「World Masters Games 2021 Kansai (WMG2021)」. To overview current projects and the cooperation status between related organizations in host cities, we conducted document research and interviews with key informants of each organization. We observed that a wide-area sporting event facilitated cooperation between the public and communal sectors, not only during the bidding stage (Stage1) but also during the transition to the hosting selection stage (Stage2) and operational preparation stage(Stage3), combining community capacity (Level of skills and resources, Nature of social relations, Structures, mechanism, and spaces for community dialog, Leadership, Civic participation, Value system, and Learning culture), and actively developing a convention preparation project. The findings of this study suggest that small host cities that are planning to organize a wide-area sporting event have established a cooperative system with the host cities, beginning from the bidding stage. Furthermore, with the transition to the preparatory stage (Stage 3), the public, private, and combined sectors cooperate to combine community capacity for achieving their predetermined strategic goals. Additionally, findings implied that event stakeholders were mutually sharing strategies for creating a sustainable local legacy to the host city from pre-event stages
