Early community recommendations for sustainable mega-events: evidence from the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games

Abstract

Recommendations are a high form of community consultation, but rarely solicited in surveys of resident attitudes despite their potential to better inform planning and foster stronger event loyalty in an era of mega-event crisis. This paper innovates by identifying and structuring open-ended recommendations for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games from host region residents 10 years prior to that mega-event. From an online survey of 897 respondents, 946 discrete recommendations for event “success” were organised through thematic analysis into high level “event,” “community” and “organiser” themes. In the emergent community vision for the Games derived from these themes, host city residents aspire for efficient, affordable, and authentic Games that benefit and involve the host community and learn from the past. The vision’s focus on resident self-interest is unsurprising but challenges event organisers to accommodate the interests of multiple stakeholders. The aspiration for a sustainable community, nevertheless, is conducive to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and complements recent IOC reforms and the official 2032 Games Vision which call for greater responsiveness to host community interests. Under a framework of soft transformative governance, facilitating micro-transformations should ensure that marginalised groups are heard and their aspirations integrated into early mega-event planning.

Keywords:

• Mega-events
• Olympic Games
• recommendations
• transformative governance
• sustainable development goals
• stakeholder theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Weaver

Dr. Brent Moyle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to tourism research, partnering with researchers and communities to maximise outcomes. Brent conducts research at the interface between theory and practice, engaging extensively with industry partners to complete research with impact. His passion for sustainable regional development laid the foundations for a number of long-term collaborations with local government and parks agencies. Brent has published over 70 journal articles on sustainable tourism and conceptually related areas, with a number of external grants to support research initiatives.

Char-lee McLennan

Dr. Char-lee Moyle is a Department of State Development, Tourism and Innovation Mid-Career Research Fellow in the School of Management at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research is focused in three main streams: 1) regional economic development and transformation, 2) strategic policy and planning, and 3) the adoption of sustainability. She is the Developer of the Longitudinal Australian Business Integrated Intelligence (LABii) DataVault and the Team Lead for the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Australia. Char-lee has undertaken numerous commercial research projects, including revitalizing regional tourism infrastructure, labour market analyses, cost-benefit and gap analyses and exploring strategic issues in Australian tourism.

Brent Moyle

Dr. David Weaver has held professorial appointments in Australia, Canada and the USA. He has published over 160 journal articles, book chapters and books, and maintains an active research agenda in sustainable tourism management, core/periphery models, ecotourism, dark tourism and resident perceptions of tourism. His textbooks include Advanced Introduction to Sustainable Tourism (Edward Elgar), Tourism Management (Wiley Australia, with Laura Lawton), and Ecotourism (Wiley Australia). He is a Fellow Emeritus of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism, has delivered numerous invited keynote addresses worldwide, and held a prestigious Chang Jiang Scholarship from the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Gian Luca Casali

Dr. Luca Casali is a member of the Business and Law Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and holds a BBA (Marketing), Graduate Diploma of Business Administration, MBA (International Business), and PhD in Business QUT. He has also enhanced his pedagogical skills by being awarded Senior Fellow (SFHEA) and Associate Fellow (Indigenous) (HEA). His research and publication focus is on entrepreneurship and innovation, transformative governance and tourism management. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Research Policy, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of Business Research.