Triple Bottom Line Event Evaluation: A proposed framework for holistic event evaluation

Although there has long been an interest in measuring the economic impacts of events, it is only relatively recently that concern about the sustainability of event tourism has driven an imperative to develop methods for evaluating and monitoring other sorts of impacts including social and environmental. This trend mirrors moves in general tourism and business more broadly where discussion about triple bottom line reporting underpins a move for enterprises to be accountable to stakeholders, not only in regard to the economic bottom line, but also with regard to their “footprint” on the environment and on society more broadly. There is substantial enthusiasm for this trend, but a limiting factor is the current lack of an accepted set of evaluation techniques to underpin the Triple Bottom Line reporting process. The Sustainable Tourism CRC has been working on developing appropriate techniques for this purpose. Techniques for the economic evaluation of events are well developed and there is general agreement about the appropriate indicators to be reported. Although environmental indicators have only rarely been applied in an events context, appropriate and accepted indicators have been developed to measure the environmental impact of other activities, and these are readily transferable to the events situation. However, techniques to evaluate social impacts lag behind the other areas, partially because less effort has so far been put into developing them, but also because they are far more complex. The desired economic and environmental outcomes of events are fairly clear. Ideally an event should generate substantial new revenue for a region and promote employment opportunities without substantially burdening the environment. Thus energy and water consumption, and the generation of waste should be as small as possible. However, with regard to social impacts, the desired outcomes are not as clear. Social impacts do not necessarily accrue evenly across a community and many of them are not objectively measurable. Additionally, social goals vary amongst the community, and what may be perceived as a social benefit by one community (or community sub-group), may not be viewed as such by others. The characteristics of the community also influence the extent to which potential social benefits and costs will be realised by a given type of event. Thus, it seems unlikely that a single generic set of social indicators will ever be developed. However, given the ambition of Triple Bottom Line reporting, efforts need to be made to overcome these difficulties as far as possible. This paper outlines a proposed method for evaluating key performance indicators of events in the economic, environmental and social domains. It then goes on to suggest a technique for examining these domains holistically by utilising a framework which allows consideration of the inevitable tradeoffs between positive and negative impacts within and between the different domains.