Concluding Remarks

Abstract

This work brought under the same roof two issue-areas. One of them dealt with the most popular sport mega-event, the Olympic Games, and the other dealt with the environment, in all of its expressions. In essence, this book has been dedicated in its entirety to an examination of the inter-relationship between these two issue-areas by employing the instruments of critical analysis offered by environmental sociology. The initial impetus for this exploration was stimulated by the identification of a developmental process whereby both of these seemingly incongruent items converged with one another to such an extent that mega-event hosting without factoring for the environment had become inconceivable. With the emergence of contemporary environmental concern in the 1960s and 1970s, the staging of the Olympic Games and the protection of the natural environment and its resources from over-exploitation appeared to be guided by diametrically opposed rationales and processes, yet since the 1990s, prospective Olympic hosts have been encouraged to factor in the environmental dimension in both their bidding application and in their subsequent preparations for hosting the event. That development further intensified the initial impetus by opening up a new, exploratory rubric that called for a full-blown exploration of the capacity of Olympic Games hosting in affecting the ecological modernization (EM) of the host nation.