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Key characteristics of green festivals: A critical review of the music and arts festival
Conference presentation

Key characteristics of green festivals: A critical review of the music and arts festival

Alonso Vazquez Marisol, Timothy J Lee and Aaron Tkaczynski
International Tourism Conference: Tourism, Culture and the Creative Industries: Exploring the Linkages, 2nd (St. Augustine, Trinidad, 18-Jan-2012–21-Jan-2012)
University of the West Indies, Department of Management Studies
2012
url
https://sta.uwi.edu/conferences/12/tourism/proceedings.aspView
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Abstract

Tourism
In the past two decades, festivals have shown a fast growth in the tourism and leisure industries as a tourist attraction having a significant economic, socio-cultural and political impact on the destination or host community. But, there are sometimes bad behaviours that could damage the image of the place. As a consequence of the negative impacts involved in the organization of a music festival, such as waste, noise, energy consumption, plus greenhouse gas emissions, because of the use of the transport to travel to the tourist attraction, a new type of festival has arisen and has been increasing in the last ten years - the so-called Green or Sustainable festivals. In this decade, the green tendency is perhaps linked with a greater awareness of the effect of climate change on tourism but also perhaps, it is attributable to a growing interest in companies in socially-responsible activities. The current situation of the green festivals reflects the need for more research about this new tendency. The issues that are involved in the organizations on the one hand are the complex study of the stakeholders' management, the critique of their environmental performance and how to control bad social behaviour during the event. On the other hand, the positive aspects that must be considered are that these festivals could be seen as a stage for fostering changes in the bad behaviour; a space to approach a specific target of the population difficult to reach in another way, and the satisfaction of the attendees' psychological needs. Although there is an increment in the practice of the festivals that mix arts, music, eco-friendly and environmental messages, there is a lack of academic research focused on the environmental outcomes in event tourism and in the green events. There are some studies in the events field that are related to how green initiatives work on the image benefits for mega-events or highly-polluted events. But there are a few that focus on the study of special events, such as music and arts festivals linked with eco-friendly initiatives and their management challenges. The present study's aim is to explore and review the music and arts festivals that have sustainable environmental initiatives in their operation and provide the key characteristics of the green festivals with the purpose of increasing the recognition of this new way of sustainability practice in the music and arts festivals. It also includes suggestions for future research in greening events.

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