Greening the Festival Industry: adopting different initiatives to encourage sustainability in events

Abstract

Event organisers play a vital role to the implementation of sustainable events among festivals’ organisations and audience. The success of sustainable festivals can be related to the use of local communities and stakeholders due to the potential they have to increase the concept of sustainability among attendees. Considerable attention has been paid to the importance of implementing sustainable events among festivals’ organisations and audience in order to reduce or solve environmental impacts. Drawing upon a mixed method research undertaken, this study aims to examine different ways in which event organisers perceive the socio-economic importance of such sustainable festivals from attendees’ perceptions, to explore the interest that attendees have in sustainable practices at festivals and to examine strategies in which organisers could implement a greener event to their audiences. The aim of this research is to contribute to the gap in the literature on these topic areas, whilst providing an insight into attendees’ interest in green practices and event organisers’ experiences in sustainable festivals. In addition, studies on this field were conducted using a qualitative and quantitative research, consequently, to carry out this research study, a mixed method was used to provide further research of both, attendees and event organisers’ perceptions. The sample size for the quantitative research was 50 participants, data was gathered through an online survey. On the other hand, the sample size for the qualitative research was an event manager, data was collected through a semi-structured interview.The findings of the study revealed that festivals can educate consumers’ behaviours by implementing green practices into visitors’ core values and marketing the event with messages of environmental responsibility. The results showed that there is a high interest among festivals’ attendees in participating in green practices. Therefore, event organisers are considered key drives in the journey toward a sustainable world in the event industry. Keywords: festivals, sustainability, green practices, organisers, attendees