Mega-events are frequently promoted as catalysts for regional development, yet communities located near event activities may remain peripheral to the governance processes through which opportunities and legacies are produced. This study examines how event governance structures and local relational capacity shaped the participation of two rural, venue-adjacent communities in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and how these relationships performed under COVID-19 disruption.
The study adopts a comparative embedded case design of two rural hot-spring (onsen) towns in the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan that were located near Olympic activities. Drawing on 22 semi-structured interviews with local businesses and public-sector stakeholders, the analysis examines how bonding, bridging, and linking relationships interacted with event governance structures to shape planning participation, institutional access, and responses to disruption. COVID-19 is treated as a stress test of these governance relationships.
Geographic proximity to Olympic activities did not produce meaningful or evenly distributed participation. Most local stakeholders had limited involvement in planning, while institutional access was concentrated among selected actors, particularly accommodation providers, and cross-sector coordination remained weak. When COVID-19 eliminated anticipated economic and symbolic opportunities, businesses adapted individually and some accessed institutional support, but these capacities rarely developed into coordinated destination-level responses.
This study advances event scholarship by conceptualizing peripheral participation as a relational rather than purely spatial condition. It introduces relational peripheralization to explain how communities and local actors may remain connected to a mega-event while occupying weak positions within the relationships that structure information, resources, participation, and influence. The study further reframes social capital as relational capacity within event governance and shows how disruption can reveal whether existing relationships support collective adaptive capacity when anticipated event opportunities collapse.
