TY - THES ID - 138514103 TI - Outline of the Implementation of Environmentally Sustainable Initiatives in Flemish Sports Federations AU - Pauwels, Laura AU - Könecke, Thomas AU - Hugaerts, Ine AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Bewegings- en Revalidatiewetenschappen. Opleiding Master in de bewegings- en sportwetenschappen (Leuven) PY - 2023 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Bewegings- en Revalidatiewetenschappen DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:138514103 AB - Environmental sustainability (ES) is a relatively new topic within the sports industry. Nowadays, sports managers have to adapt to changing conditions due to internal and external pressures. These adaptations require managers to acquire a lot of new knowledge. Although more and more literature on the subject has been published over the past decades, there is still a big gap. Managers of smaller sports federations in particular suffer from a lack of research. The aim of this study is to gain a detailed understanding of the extent to which sports federations in Flanders undertake environmentally friendly initiatives. These insights are obtained by addressing three research questions. The first research question (RQ1) elaborates on how many and which initiatives the Flemish sports federations implement. Moreover, the profundity of them and how can they be categorised into the three waves proposed by McCullough et al. (2016) is examined in the second research question (RQ2). Finally, the main aim of this study is to investigate to what extent the characteristics of sports federations influence the number and profundity of their environmental initiatives (RQ3). Through semi-structured interviews, 17 executives from Flemish sports federations were interviewed about the environmental sustainability initiatives implemented by the federation. Based on these interviews, a picture was drawn of the distribution of the Flemish sports landscape in terms of environmental sustainability. Every federation was aware of an increasing problem and already implemented a fair number of initiatives. However, the data analysis showed that most initiatives are still at an early stage, both in terms of quantity and profundity (i.e. still in the start-up phase). The first wave, which represents the easiest but most visible actions, was most present. The second and third waves, where initial awareness becomes knowledge, were less prominent. Moreover, the study found that large sports federations implemented a larger number and more in-depth initiatives than sports federations with other characteristics. Moreover, it can be observed that Golf Vlaanderen is ahead of the other Flemish federations, both in terms of the number of initiatives and their profundity. ER -