Advancing Environmental Sustainability at Canadian Festivals

Study 1: A Scoping Review of Environmental Communication at Festivals Environmental communication, a sub-category of sustainability communication, has been increasingly adopted in festival settings to promote pro-environmental behaviors among stakeholders, shape a green image, and enhance an organization’s reputation. This study reviewed 37 articles published in English to identify dominant trends in this area of research. This scoping review revealed that music festivals have received the most research attention compared to other types of festivals. Attendees are often considered as the primary audience for environmental communication, with their perspectives and responses being the most frequently documented. Festivals serve as an educational platform for communicating a variety of environmental topics, with waste management and climate change receiving comparatively more attention. While some studies have explored the effectiveness of different message frames on attendees’ pro-environmental intentions, this area remains under-researched. Future studies are encouraged to test a broader range of theory-informed environmental communication interventions to advance the field further. Study 2: Understanding How Canadian Festivals Address Environmental Sustainability through the Lens of the UN SDGs This study explored how Canadian festivals have aligned with and incorporated the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their festival management through a multiple case study research design. All festivals included in this research demonstrated a wide range of commitments to environmental sustainability. While two festivals have voluntarily aligned with the SDGs to position themselves within a broader global discourse, most did not perceive this adoption as an urgent priority. Common challenges to this adoption included limited organizational capacity, the lack of practical value of the SDGs, minimal pressure from external stakeholders, and insufficient resource support in terms of budget and education resources. Importantly, engagement with the SDGs was not driven by external requirements, but more by intrinsic motivations and perceived relevance to their stakeholders. This study contributes to the growing literature on environmental sustainability in festival management by presenting the challenges involved in localizing global frameworks like the SDGs within local festival contexts. Study 3: Canadian Festivals’ Commitment to Environmental Sustainability: A Volunteer Perspective As a key internal stakeholder group, volunteers play an important but underexplored role in advancing environmental sustainability at festivals in Canada. This study drew on survey responses from volunteers and interviews with volunteer managers of three festivals. By applying Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) framework, this study investigated how volunteers perceive their festival’s organizational culture around environmental sustainability and how these perceptions related to their intention to return. Overall, volunteers showed a strong willingness to return. Their perceptions of a festival’s environmental commitment were weakly but significantly associated with their retention. This study also examined volunteers’ on-site pro-environmental behaviours, both private-sphere (e.g., recycling, using public transportation) and social-environmental (e.g., peer advocacy), and the types of organizational support that encouraged these behaviours. Findings highlighted the importance of infrastructures in supporting private-sphere pro-environmental behaviours, while social-environmental behaviours are more strongly influenced by perceived organizational culture, organizational support, leadership, and peer involvement. Overall, this study extended workplace environmental psychology to festival settings, which highlighted opportunities to include sustainability more deeply into volunteer experiences and volunteer management practices. For example, one important approach is to provide clear communication about the festival’s environmental initiatives across all volunteer groups, facilitated by staff and peer volunteers.

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