| Summary: | The guidelines of environmentally responsible meeting arrangements have been developed during Finland’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council and applied in every meeting organised. Still, there was no evidence of the solutions. The main aim of this thesis was, therefore, to document environmentally responsible solutions and how those had been implemented in The Arctic Council’s Ministerial Meeting in Rovaniemi. Moreover, the concept of Green Office and Green Meeting were included as the aim was also to develop the Green Meeting concept. The commissioners of this thesis were Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland together with WWF Finland. The practical arrangements of The Arctic Council’s Ministerial Meeting included catering services, venue designing, transportation services, and other acquisitions that were all evaluated from the environmental responsibility perspective. Besides environmental responsibility, the theory of this thesis included environmental aspects such as the greenhouse effect and its impacts on climate change, sustainable development, ecological footprint, carbon footprint and life cycle thinking and environmental protection. A mixed method approach was utilised in this research and various qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Based on participant observation, structured observation, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative content analysis conducted during the research process of this thesis, the author was also able to identify points that were not considered in the concept. The thesis acknowledges that if the aim is environmentally responsible meetings, all the actors should be considered equally, regardless of whether those actors had visible parts in the process. Otherwise, the concept loses its purpose. Additionally, as a payer, the contributor’s responsibility should be emphasised even more. Further, improvement ideas for the guide on environmental responsibility in meeting arrangements were found as a result of this study.
|
|---|