[Week 4] Expedition 02 / “OMG it’s Carly McLachlan”

This week saw the long-awaited Expedition 02 taking place in the city, the feedback session to present a first look at the outputs from the UN Accelerator City programme. Lining up a who’s who of the UK’s sustainable events sector this event neatly served a second function actings as an end-of-year works do for many of us, and it was great to see everyone from various corners of the sector come together to hear about the work that has taken place in Liverpool over the last year.

Expedition 02

An early highlight to the day was recognising one of my academic heroes in real life and blurting out “OMG it’s Carly McLachlan!” mid-sentence right in the face of Carly McLachlan of the Tyndall Centre. Carly is largely responsible for the work towards Act 1.5, and I think I managed to convey through nervous excitement that I was a huge fan of Carly’s research and would like the opportunity to explore alignment at some point in the future. It is always lovely to meet your heroes, and they turn out to be legends - Carly didn’t seem too put off by my horrific inability to reign in social awkwardness and we managed a couple of chats throughout the day which touched on research and the challenges academics face trying to effect change within the live events sector. Carly also introduced me to Lois Pennington, another climate researcher at the Tyndall Centre as well as an offer to pick up with introductions and further discussions in the new year, an email draft already sitting in my outbox…

Still waiting to pick up my delegate badge, it was exciting and confusing trying to get around everyone before the sessions began. When I first started bringing research to the live events sector I didn’t know anyone and the biggest challenge was trying to pluck up enough courage to start a conversation. Fast forward four years and I’m at the premier event for sustainable event practice on the planet and I think I probably know more than half the people in the room. Lucky it was for me then that Dr Mathew Flynn, Co-Director at Music Futures was on hand to rapidly introduce me to everyone else, setting me up with a range of responsibilities from a role on the Liverpool City Council Environmental Task & Finish group to co-writing an UKRI bid to fund ongoing sector research.

Delegate badge now in hand we were onto the programme that the Liverpool City Region Destination Partnership promised would “celebrate successful prototypes… charting the course for sector-wide transition and beyond” – something I’m pleased to say it was at least partially successful at achieving, especially considering the sheer scale of ambition. Speeches from councillors and programme coordinators were followed by a series of presentations and panels from the various project strands. There were excellent examples of innovation from the BBC Big Weekend at Sefton Park as well as a panel featuring Manchester and Bristol City Councils, both of whom shared case studies of best practice from projects underway in their regions. This established the tone for the day which used examples of external activities and projects to perhaps paper over the fact we will all have to wait a little longer to learn about the outcomes of pilots launched at Expedition One. There was a nod to shared endeavour from a statement of intent that has been signed by various organisations across the live events sector, but ultimately it looks like everyone will need to wait until 2026 to see the fruits of this labour.

The erudite and dashing Ross Patel, LIVE’s Green Impact Consultant delivered my favourite talk of the day which electrified the tail end of talk-heavy programme. His speech painted a picture of an emergent but fragile ecosystem of sustainable innovation within the live events industry, detailing LIVE’s harmonisation of various projects that have built an evidence base and case for policy change in the UK over several years. Ross’s speech served to underline quite how much the industry has matured, with a roadmap to a green transition for the live events sector outlined as part of political pressure built behind the upcoming Show Must Go On report, standing in stark contrast to the capitulation on delivering material outcomes from UNAC.

Ross Patel from LIVE delivering a brilliant account of sector-based environmental policy projects

I guess a PhD blog is not the most appropriate place to begin exploring personal perspectives on the sector politics at play behind all of this. For me the programme played out pretty much as expected but I can understand why so many people had higher expectations of anything where the UN might be involved. My wider experience of working at the conceptual mid-point of academia, sector and state is that big words happen in these big rooms, but little else. These events are good for networking, look great for creating promo reels (not to mention local authority photo ops) but I believe it would be unfair to judge the UNAC programme on this event alone. The real work happens in the much less glamourous world of spreadsheets and Teams meetings, which admittedly makes for far less inspiring press releases. It was of no surprise then that I found myself in a meeting three weeks later discussing how deliverables for UNAC could actually be achieved, and then subsequently tasked with co-delivery.

I’ll have to wait until further information is made public on January 12^th to continue this particular research adventure and many of the elements from the Land Use project that may go on to inform at least part of my PhD have seemingly been developed in isolation from the wider events community, so it will be interesting to see what environmental standards have been developed in the art brut style. In the meantime, I will continue to internally cringe every time I autopsy the memory of meeting an academic hero only for the first words to fall out of my mouth to be “OMG it’s Carly McLachlan!”

Except OMG was definitely a swear.