Analysis of Sustainability of Tomorrowland Event
Analysis of Sustainability of Tomorrowland Event
Introduction and Context
The focus of this report is about sustainable event management. It aims to look at a major event and the sustainability policy of that event. The report briefly analyses the policy versus its actual implementation in real-life. The report reviews the earlier literature about sustainable event management. It examines the various theories related to corporate social responsibility and ISO 20121, which is the international standard for sustainable event management. The report then relates the findings at the present event to the sustainability theory. The report then presents the conclusions.
Tomorrowland is an electronic dance music (EDM) festival that had started in 2004 as a small festival, in Boom, Belgium. Boom is between the three cities of Antwerp, Mechelen, and Brussels. It started initially with an attendance of 9000 people, which has now reached 400,000. It happens in summer at the end of July for three days. Famous musicians such as Armin Van Buren, Avicii, David Guetta, and many others participate in this event. The festival has grown mainly due to word-of-mouth. The event features extravagant sets, with fire, smoke, and confetti blasting out of the stages during the event. People reach the event through cars, buses, trains, and bicycles. People have an option to camp or glamp, which is nothing but a more luxurious version of camping with its own bed and electricity. It is too young an event to have become a cultural event but is slowly on the way to becoming one. The organisers are planning similar events in the USA and Brazil.
Assessing the Sustainability Policy
The organisers of Tomorrowland are working with Rijkswaterstaat, a knowledge institute in the field of waste, to manage the generated waste better. The rules and regulations of the Tomorrowland Festival show that the organisers care about the environment. The park De Schorre, which is home to the Tomorrowland and DreamVille, is a beautiful park. DreamVille is the place where the visitors clamp (or glamp). At the De Schorre, the organisers have started making special arrangements for waste handling and they have requested the visitors to be responsible and deposit waste in the proper receptacles after segregating them. Tomorrowland has a zero tolerance to the use of drugs and has a “no drug policy”. Their policy is to evict anybody caught with the drugs or using or in relevant cases hand them over to the policy. Visitors can dispose of their drugs before they enter the premises. Drugs such as Molly, Cocaine, and Ketamine are popular at the music festivals where the fans use these for the excess energy and pleasure these give. Therefore, this is a welcome move by Tomorrowland.
Policy versus Practice
Carroll (1991) presented CSR as a multi-layered concept in the form of a pyramid (Figure 1) consisting of four interrelated dimensions: economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities, with the economic responsibility of being profitable being the foundation of the pyramid. The other layers are on top of this foundation, one after the other as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Carroll’s CSR pyramid
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According to Van Tulder and Van Der Zwart (2006), companies having issues with their ethical practices are generally at the forefront of the CSR issues. A real-life example for this study is Coca-Cola. In 2007, it launched “live positively”, a sustainability framework embedded in the system at all levels with seven core areas including beverage benefits, active healthy living, the community, energy and climate, sustainable packaging, water stewardship and the workplace. Coca-Cola had adopted international CSR guidelines such as Global Compact and Ruggie’s Framework but did not integrate these guidelines into its Code of Business. However, Coca-Cola cross-references them in its annual sustainability reports, which follows GRI G3 sustainability reporting guidelines.
The Centre for Science and Environment (2003) reported elevated levels of pesticides in Coca-Cola, exceeding the levels of European Standards by many times. A similar test in 2006 by CSE again showed similar elevated levels of pesticides. The people of Plachimada in Kerala, southern India accused Coca-Cola of polluting the surrounding water bodies by discharging wastewater into fields and rivers. This polluted the nearby rivers, soil, and groundwater. People in nearby villages also accused that it over extracted the ground water for use due to which the area experienced drought. Due to these allegations, Coca-Cola saw a sales drop of 40 percent in India and 15 percent worldwide. The conflict extended to the US where some universities banned Coca-Cola from their campuses.
Initially, Coca-Cola denied its responsibilities in all the cases, due to which it had to court a lot of negative publicity. Later, it realised this mistake and changed tactics. It started taking damage control methods and used its Corporate Review Report to address this issue. It created a Coca-Cola India Foundation, Anadana, to work with local communities and NGOs to address the issue of the water problem. It also started launching various community water projects in India including rainwater-harvesting projects to address the depleting groundwater situation. Its stated aim is to become a net zero user of ground water by 2009, but it achieved this in 2011. It implemented water stewardship program in 2007 with three goals:
Reduce water usage, improve efficiency by 20 percent
Recycle water through wastewater treatment to support agriculture 100 percent by 2010
Replenish water used by providing other community water harvesting methods by 2020. Currently, it holds a portfolio of 386 community water partnerships, and by 2011 it has replenished about 35 percent of water used in beverages
Coca-Cola entered into a partnership with World Wide Fund for Nature to understand the nature of water usage and develop a common framework for water conservation.
Sustainability Theory
CSR and Sustainability
There has been a renewed interest in the sustainable development and CSR during the past few years. Due to both voluntary reasons and regulatory requirements, companies have had to account for their non-financial performance through various means, some of which have to be about the impact of the companies’ actions and their impact on the social, economic, and environmental aspects on the localities in which they operate. These include stating a number of operational indicators in their annual statements, which include gender equality, health and safety, disability policies, subcontractor arrangements, water, raw material and energy consumption, and biodiversity efforts.
The debate about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) started with the seminal book by Bowen (1953) Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. Later, the terminology changed to CSR and there has been a proliferation of theories, approaches, and models to explain its significance. When the concepts corporate citizenship and corporate sustainability have surfaced, scholars started comparing them to the notion of CSR. These theories combine the approaches and use terminology that means different things. To illustrate, CSR might convey the idea of ethical and responsible behaviour, legal responsibility or liability, charitable contribution, being socially conscious, and others as a fiduciary duty responding to a higher standard.
However, Frederick (1987; 1998), classified them as CSR1 (ethical-philosophical concept), CSR2 (the concept of social responsiveness based on managerial action), CSR3 (based on ethics and values), and CSR4 (social issues in management). One philosophy was maximising the shareholder value, which states that investment in social causes should produce an increase in shareholder value, thereby separating socio-economic and economic objectives. Other theories focused on resource allocation to achieve long-term social objectives and competitive advantage. A third group consider cause-related marketing, which is the process of deciding on the marketing activities that offer investment by the company in a particular cause in exchange for something else.
Davis (1960), in his theory “corporate constitutionalism”, introduced business power as a new element in CSR, stating that business is a social institution, and must use power responsibly. The integrative social contract theory assumes an implicit social contract between business and the society, with the business fulfilling its implicit obligations towards society through CSR. Since some corporations are larger than some governments, the corporate citizenship acquired new meaning. Some theories about corporate citizenship base themselves on social contract theory while others explored other options.
According to Ackerman and Bower (1976), the responsiveness of corporates in the face of social issues lies in a gap between the expectations of the public and actual performance, called the zone of discretion (neither regulated nor illegal nor sanctioned). These theories accommodate the principle of public responsibility, stakeholder management, and corporate social performance. These theories include normative stakeholder theory, which is actually an ethical issue according to some scholars and more appropriate in this category than integrative category. According to this theory, a socially responsible firm must balance the multiplicity of legitimate interests of all appropriate stakeholders and not just shareholders. The universal rights theory considers the Global Sullivan Principles or the UN Global Compact as the basis for CSR. Another values based concept, sustainable development, has gained momentum recently, which was popularised by the Brundtland Report. The report states that the present generation must meet its needs o without compromising the ability of the future generation to meet their needs.
ISO 20121- Event Sustainability Management Systems
Figure 2: ISO 20121 – Model for event sustainability management
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The ISO 20121 is a set of guidelines for use for conducting a sustainable event, following a sequential process of Denning’s Cycle – Plan, Do, Check, Act as shown in Figure 1. ISO 20121 provides a framework of the event’s supply chain enabling them to consider the social, environmental, and economic impacts. The standards are applicable to all events, including the cultural events. Organisations can identify the issues that matter to them most and develop a sustainability policy outlining their commitments to sustainability. The organisations then develop SMART sustainability objectives, train the staff, engage the suppliers on sustainability, develop a communications plan, monitor and measure the effect of the actions, and audit and review the documentation.
Present Findings
Profitability
The reason why businesses are setup is to give the shareholders a reasonable return on their investments, provide employees safe and well-paid jobs, and give customers good quality products at a fair price. Therefore, the company’s first responsibility is to be a properly functioning economic unit and to stay in business. It forms the foundation of the CSR pyramid. Hence, according to Carroll (1991), the satisfaction of economic responsibilities is thus required of all corporations.
The 2013 edition of Tomorrowland festival had a profit of about 16 million euros, while it had a positive impact on Belgian economy to the tune of 70 million euros. It also employs more than 5000 employees directly and thousands more indirectly. The festival consumes millions of pints of drinks, tonnes of food, and sells huge quantities of merchandise, which provides employment for many
Legal Responsibility
Corporations have a legal responsibility, which demands that businesses abide by the law and ‘play by the rules of the game’. Laws are a codified version of moral values, therefore; it is a prerequisite for other layers of the CSR pyramid. It is also true that the corporations have to fulfil their legal responsibilities to keep their license and function. However, considering the ongoing coverage of corporate frauds, scandals and lawsuits, it is not always true that companies abide by this responsibility. Accordingly, Carroll (1991) suggests that satisfying legal responsibilities is only next to satisfying economic responsibilities.
Ethical Responsibility
Ethical responsibilities guide corporations to do what is right, just and fair even when the legal responsibilities does not force them. Laws vary from state to state and change over time. Legislators may pass laws to protect self-interests or interests of a particular group. However, ethical standards are not transient; they are permanent. Therefore, Carroll (1991) argues that ethical responsibilities are always over and above economic and legal responsibilities.
Tomorrowland has specific provisions for the disabled people, which include parking near the main entrance, elevators, special toilets, wooden floors, and special camping space. They can take guide dogs for guidance. Some of these measures cover the legal responsibilities, but some go beyond the legal requirements. They cover the ethical responsibilities.
Discretionary Responsibility
The fourth level of CSR is the discretionary or philanthropic responsibilities of corporations. This model includes everything within the corporation’s discretion to improve the quality of life of employees and local communities. This includes matters such as charitable donations, extra facilities for employees and their families, support for local schools, or sponsoring of art and sports events. According to Carroll (1991), philanthropic responsibilities are therefore merely desires of the societies or employees from the corporations, not requirements and hence are ‘less important than the other three categories’.
Tomorrowland promotes disadvantaged musicians by providing them with a platform to expose their talent thereby giving them a chance to shine and make a career. This act will fulfil the fourth tier of the CSR pyramid, as it is not a legal, ethical, or economic requirement.
Conclusion
Tomorrowland festival is a large event with about 400,000 attendance for three days in Belgium. Due to its scale, it has a profound environment, social, and economic impact. Examining the festival based on the theory of CSR for sustainability, specifically the pyramid of CSR shows that the festival does fulfil its four responsibilities. However, when considering the ISO 20121, the guidelines for sustainable event management, one cannot say for sure if the festival adheres to the guidelines are not. It does not measure its environmental impact; it does not have targets for water conservation, measurement and targets for carbon emission and how it Tomorrowland plans to offset it. It does not seem to have any sustainable policy or policy for its suppliers and partners to follow to do business with Tomorrowland. It does not have any estimates of carbon emissions or measures of embodied carbon for the construction activities that take place in Tomorrowland. In the absence of measures, it is difficult for Tomorrowland to have targets or monitoring compliance.
Recommendations
Tomorrowland should have a sustainability policy
It should have commitments for the supply chain for ensuring they follow their own sustainability measures
Have a system to measure carbon emissions so that Tomorrowland can sponsor projects elsewhere to offset the carbon emissions
Have a recycling process and targets so that that Tomorrowland minimises the energy and water consumption
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