“No festivals on a dead planet”: The transformative potential of cultural festivals through green growth and degrowth lenses

Cultural festivals carry unique transformative capacities for a sustainability transition. This chapter aims to unpack this relationship by exploring these capacities as well as by investigating how festival sustainability experts practise and understand sustainability. Festivals' transformative capacities are categorised under liminality, offering temporal spaces outside the mundane, and multiplicity, bringing together actors from different spheres and their justifications. Their sustainable efforts are analysed through the green growth and degrowth lenses to sustainability. Through interviews with festival sustainability experts, we assess the transformational capacities of festivals in relation to how they (can) promote sustainability either following the green growth or degrowth approach. Hence, this chapter contributes to a more thorough and critical understanding of the role of the Creative and Cultural Industries in a sustainability transition.