Whether global events are world expositions, Olympics or sporting championships, arts festivals or trade fairs, they can promote economic growth, boost tourism and trade, raise the profile of a place and bring communities together. They can also serve as a catalyst for international social, environmental and economic improvement through well-designed monitoring, measurement and evaluation mechanisms.
The OECD Recommendation on Global Events and Local Development outlines the actions event hosts can take throughout the global event cycle, including pre-bidding, bidding, operational and delivery phases. The Recommendation is complemented by the Global Events Toolkit, turning it into concrete actionable steps that host countries can adopt to make global events more sustainable, build stronger capacities to leverage local benefits and support global change.
As with past pandemics like the Plague, influenza and COVID-19, the repercussions of this year’s outbreak were felt in different ways in different places. This reinforces the notion that globalisation and global events impact ‘all places’ to differing degrees, and weakens the idea that globalisation is a uniform process.
Geographers have a critical role to play in understanding how globalisation creates the events that become global. By doing so, we can direct these processes to create international improvements and help to transform the negative impacts of globalisation on people’s lives. This will be possible if we can harness the intelligence of those attending major global events to overcome today’s catastrophism and turn them into vectors for rediscovered diplomatic, commercial and educational collaboration between countries.