Green Music Festivals in Europe

Music festivals are increasingly expected to respond to environmental and climate challenges, yet little is known about how sustainability is actually organised across the sector. This book offers a comparative and research-based analysis of how music festival organisations engage with environmental sustainability, examining not only environmental practices and performance, but also the strategies, decision-making processes, and certification pathways through which greening takes shape. Focusing on festivals in Northern and Southern Europe, the book shows that environmental action is shaped by uneven combinations of organisational capacity, strategic priorities, stakeholder pressures, and contextual conditions. Drawing on original mixed-method research, the book combines a large-scale survey of music festivals with expert interviews and contextual desk research. It explores three interconnected dimensions of festival greening: environmental practices and performance across key impact areas such as mobility, energy, waste, water, and procurement; sustainability strategies and organisational decision-making; and the adoption and role of environmental certification. In doing so, it moves beyond single-case descriptions and selective best practices to provide one of the first systematic comparative studies of how key festival characteristics, including size, budget, ownership, age, genre, and territorial context, relate to greening processes in the live music sector. Green Music Festivals in Europe will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in festival and event studies, cultural management, sustainability, and cultural policy. It will also be valuable to festival organisers, sustainability managers, consultants, educators, certification bodies, and policy makers seeking a deeper and more practically grounded understanding of how environmental sustainability can be developed across music festivals and the wider cultural sector.

Giada Calvano is Co-Founder of Chloe Sustainability, a consulting company that supports cultural organisations in their journey towards sustainability. She is also an academic lecturer in cultural management, sustainable events and festivals, and international cultural cooperation at various European universities.

Part I - Concepts, Perspectives and Methods 1. Music Festivals and the Challenge of Greening 2. Festivals and Environmental Sustainability: An Organisational Perspective 3. Research Design and Methods Part II - Environmental Practices, Decision-making and Certification 4. Mapping the Music Festival Landscape: Key Characteristics and Organisational Profiles 5. Environmental Practices and Performance across Music Festivals 6. Drivers, Benefits and Barriers to Festival Greening 7.The Role of Environmental Certification in Music Festivals Part III - Reflections on Festival Greening and Cultural Ecologies 8. Models of Festival Greening 9. Rethinking Festival Greening: Implications for Practice, Policy and Research