Motivating Pro-Sustainable Behavior: The Potential of Green Events—A Case-Study from the Munich Streetlife Festival

Abstract

Green events are staged to encourage visitors to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. The Munich Streetlife Festival (SLF) has such a sustainability focus reflected in an education program that aims to reach out to both sustainability-minded visitors and broader audiences. Therefore, this study examined the learning effects of the SLF’s education program regarding different visitor segments. We employed the transtheoretical model (TTM) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), to relate the learning outcomes to the visitors’ positioning in the stages of change model and visitor attitudes, subjective norms, and constraints. We conducted a visitor survey during the SLF in May 2015 and employed structural equation modelling to analyze the data. The motivational variable “learning about environmental protection” is positively correlated with pro-sustainable behaviors, whilst the variable “enjoying the event” shows a negative correlation. Our findings indicated that this event’s sustainability communication mainly appealed to sustainability-minded visitors in the action stage. Conscious visitors showed higher learning effects than visitors in the pre-contemplation stage, which was in line with the TTM’s propositions. This study enhanced our theoretical understanding of visitor behavioral change and supported green event managers in the development of target-group specific and more effective sustainability communications.