The ASEAN Member States (AMS), specifically like Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia, are some of the countries who succeeded in arranging an international music concert. In 2022, Billie Ellish came to Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore for running on her newest album tour which was titled Happier Than Ever. This year, in 2023, Singapore and Indonesia also invited a renowned band from the UK and a talented singer from the US. Just a week ago, Indonesia held a Coldplay music concert in Jakarta. Before then, Singapore organized a Taylor Swift music concert for up to 6 days in a row. Not to mention, ASEAN has signed an agreement to conduct a culture and art exchange with Korea, particularly about pop music through a number of concert tours. It is called the ASEAN Korea Music Festival (AKMF). The appropriate question that people should have asked is, “Is any of it even related to environmental issues?”.
Then the answer is “YES” indeed. If we take a look closer, between Billie Ellish, Coldplay, and Taylor Swift, three of them have a common ground to build environmental awareness quite seriously. Based on REVERB Impact Report 2022, Happier Than Ever World Tour by Billie Ellish did well-executing the green concert concept. They managed 117+ single-use plastic bottles eliminated, 8.8 million gallons of water saved by serving plant-based meals for artists and crew on tour, 15.000+ tonnes of CO2e neutralized, zero plastic bags, and collected $990,000+ raised for supporting nonprofit organizations, environmental justice, and climate projects. Same goes to any Coldplay concert that has been done before, they have been working out on the green concert concept since their first try in England. In Jakarta, Coldplay continued to lift that concept and announced that their concert successfully reduced 50%+ carbon footprint. This achievement originated from cumulative sources, for instance utilization of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) for flights, plant-based LED wristbands, kinetic dance floors, power bikes, public transportation friendly, and plastic-based cutting.
Taylor Swift and K-Pop also begin branding up their environmental face by marking their own baby steps. Taylor Swift starts introducing the sustainable fashion that she wears on the stage. Whereas the top four biggest firms behind K-Pop space, HYBE, JYP Entertainment, SM Entertainment, and YF Entertainment, reported that they have made gradual strides to reach their respective environmental goals. At least, HYBE Labels has appointed the president of the Korea Green Foundation as the director of their sustainable management committee.
From those facts, it should intrigue us to think that ASEAN has become one of the spotted regions who is able to serve and fulfill international musicians’ green or sustainable music concert agenda. However, ASEAN could lose these positive images if each AMS does not come together to strengthen the sense of environmental diplomacy strategy. Due to that, the perfect following question that we should propose is, “What does environmental diplomacy even mean?” and “What is the derivative strategy to concretize that?”.
Environmental diplomacy is one of the modern forms of diplomacy. Its emergence steadily increased since people were receiving the real threats of environmental quality degradation. Not a few players, including the states, corporations, civil society organizations and groups, gather around to find a way to tackle those environmental issues. It is written by Sonia Pedro and Isabel Soares (2022) in their academic journal titled Environmental diplomacy: from transnational policies to the role of ambassador that this type of diplomacy concept promoted the collaboration between states and transnational organizations to remedy the environmental problems.
The things that become attached with environmental diplomacy itself is that the core of the problem very much frames transnational policies and responsibilities. It means that environmental issues seem too impossible to be resolved by a single country—the more the better. According to the roots of the problem, it will automatically affect the resolvement shape and characteristic itself. It leads to how each state-government must broaden its horizon to embrace non-state power either. They need to put aside their countries’ egos for a while, then sit together to have further discussion in regulating the use of natural resources and the pollution rate, whether in terms of regional or other multilateral scope, including about the sustainable international music concert.
Unfortunately, ASEAN as a regional institution has lack of indication to modulate a greener event or show concept version, coming under the music industry or other creative industries. It could be said that the ASEAN party has not formulated sustainable music concert ideas as part of the strategic roadmap. As all ASEAN roadmap booklets have been published, for instance Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity (MPAC) 2025, Roadmap on ASEAN Cooperation towards Transboundary Haze Pollution Control with Means of Implementation, ASEAN Comprehensive Recovery Framework (ACRF), ASEAN Business Roadmap Towards Epicentrum of Growth, and others have been not nudging a bit of green or sustainable events, concerts, and so on.
All policies concentrate on urban, manufacturing, and industrialization activities. All eyes are too busy keeping eyes on direct “big-shot” government business, but forget rearranging the non-direct stakeholders, namely the creative music industry. Needed to know that in reality, both sides have a balanced role to participate in actualizing sustainable earth in every way. More than that, the creative industry existence oftenly easier to understand and accept by people from all over across group status. Somehow the creative industry has its own nature to ease down the heat of political content into something less weighty.
Besides that, ASEAN must remember that they need to take part in international trends. ASEAN has the same obligation to follow the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 20121 launching about countries’ responsibility to create sustainable events. This standard focuses on how promoters must monitor the whole management process, starting from research, concept development, and planning to implementation and post-event that goes hand-in-hand with sustainability goals.
Furthermore, in a journal titled Music Concert Promoters’ Challenges to Achieve Sustainable Events for SDGs by Dian Elvira and Luki Adiati Pratomo (2023),analyzed that the price of environmentally friendly production or logistics for event needs is relatively expensive because only few suppliers or vendors are capable of facilitating the sustainability needs of supporting the event. This is in line with sustainability practices which result in an increase in event costs which is a significant obstacle to event implementation. One of the reasons also comes from how the realization still needs to rent additional equipment to support the holding of music concerts at venues because venue standardization is still inadequate and causes expenses to increase. It was found that the uneven distribution of event-specific venue facilities hindered promoters from practicing sustainability. Not all event-specific venues can provide comprehensive event support facilities.
Considering all of the opportunities and shortcomings, ASEAN must be able to capture the sustainable music concert concept as one of the environmental diplomacy breakthroughs. Each of AMS have to arrange a fruitful regional fora which result in an agreement in building a supportive ecosystem to hold other sustainable concerts in the future. Some of them are making an integrated and intercountries less emission infrastructure renting system, diversifying also promoting sustainable event vendors, creating a collaborative network for environmentalist NGO so they can fully participate in every sustainable music concert, conducting training activities for scaling up EO’s skill in arranging sustainable music concerts, setting a maximum bar of emission producing in each music concert, and lastly attracting companies or investors as many as possible to sponsor the sustainable concert.
In this way, ASEAN could jack up its economic growth through creative industry by becoming the most reliable region to facilitate sustainable music concerts, especially welcoming the international artists. Based on previous environmental diplomacy studies, each of the stakeholders, whether government, corporation, or NGO, in the AMS neighborhood must optimize ASEAN regional community characteristics to bring a sustainable concert into reality. In which, more or less, this cooperative concatenation hopefully will magnify the means of net zero emission objective by developing a common understanding in ASEAN.