Enviornmental Sustainability Among Sport Clubs in Lund's Municipality

Abstract: Background: It is important to work with environmental sustainability and to reach this goal since protection of the natural environment is necessary. Every day without more knowledge and action gives future generations worse prerequisites to live a sustainable life. This thesis attempts to address environmental sustainability from a local perspective. Through the Swedish municipality Lund’s Municipality’s climate goals ambition for 2030 and their climate policy “LundaEko”, it is explored how the local sport clubs can contribute to the municipality’s ambition. However limited research is conducted related to environmental sustainability and grass-root sport clubs. Grass-root sport clubs are important since they have a direct impact in children and youth’s upbringing. Through the local sport clubs, Lund’s Municipality have the opportunity to reach more citizens in order to affect them to contribute to the climate goals.  Aim: The overall purpose of this study is to analyse the prerequisites for municipalities to use grass- root sport clubs to contribute to environmental sustainability. The study uses Lund’s Municipality in Sweden and the local sport clubs within the municipality as the empirical example.  Methods: Seven representatives participated in this research. Two from Lund’s Municipality, one from the national sport federation’s regional department “RFSISU Skåne” and four from local sport clubs in Lund. The data was collected from semi-structured interviews and documents/policies. Thematic analysis is used to process, organise, and analyse the collected data. Triple bottom line and institutional theory was applied as a theoretical framework, in order to analyse the data.  Results: The research shows that all interviewed sport clubs endorse environmental sustainability. However, the sport clubs are unsure how to approach the topic, due to lack of knowledge, experience and resources. The sport clubs request support in order to initiate environmental sustainability practices from Lund’s Municipality and RFSISU Skåne.  Conclusion: Lund’s Municipality is responsible of informing the sport clubs about their own climate ambitions and the clubs’ opportunities to contribute. The sport clubs are able to contribute by identify and adopt easy applicable environmental values and utilise their status as an institution to disseminate these values to their members through institutional mechanisms.