Reframing Festival Communication: Towards a Theory of Networked Sustainability Storytelling

In an era shaped by climate consciousness, platformisation, and shifting media ecologies, cultural festivals are reconfiguring their modes of communication to articulate sustainable futures. This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how digital narratives enable festivals to construct and circulate sustainability discourses, positioning them as agents within broader affective and networked publics. Moving beyond normative sustainability standards such as ISO 20121:2024, we theorise the emergence of what we call networked sustainability storytelling: a communicative paradigm through which festivals mobilise digital media to perform authenticity, cultivate community, and negotiate ecological responsibility. Anchored in van Dijck’s platform society theory, Castells’s networked communication model, and Bennett and Segerberg’s connective action framework, this study also integrates insights from digital affect studies – especially Papacharissi’s notion of affective publics – and Markham’s approaches to digital ethnography. These tools can be used to question the role of festivals not only as cultural events but as important nodes in a communicative infrastructure that involves environmental values, stakeholder relationships, and narrative authority. The article contributes to current academic literature on cultural studies, considering the intersections of media, sustainability, and collective meaning-making in reorienting festival communication as a place of narrative experimentation and socio-technical engagement.