This conceptual article provides an overview of organizational and stakeholder legitimacy as applied to the study of festivals and their networks of stakeholders. Legitimacy is shown to be a vital condition for festival acceptance and sustainability. Different kinds of criteria for judging legitimacy (legal, pragmatic, moral, and cognitive) are illustrated by reference to typical festival stakeholders. As well, legitimacy can either be situational, depending on problems at hand, or more permanently derived from legal status or institutional arrangements and ownership. Networks of stakeholders have to be considered, and at the levels of industry (i.e., the festival/event sector), area (e.g., festivals in a city), and firm (the festival organization). This article concludes with a discussion of practical management implications, and with a set of propositions that can be used as hypotheses to be tested and as a general guide for future research and interdisciplinary theory building.