ABSTRACT
As awareness of the environmental impacts of the screen media sector increases, new practices, frameworks, guidelines, and policy frameworks are developed by industry stakeholders. However, these frameworks are fraught with challenges. Key amongst them is the “responsibility deficit” in media management, that is, a lack of coordination between organizations, regulators, producers, and creatives, leading to gaps in recognizing who has accountability over the design and implementation of such policies. In response to these gaps, we have seen the development of local, national, regional, and international self-regulation mechanisms and tools (including ones by leading organizations like the Producers Guild Alliance Green and the UK’s Bafta albert). While some of these organizations are imposing careful and impactful measures like mandatory carbon reporting, infrastructural problems continue to plague the effective implementation of these approaches. Challenges arise from competing measurement tools (especially as these incentives have now become commercialized), lack of unilateral standards (heavily problematic for co-productions or runaway shoots for example), different environmental regulatory regimes, and diverse creative and managerial practices. This chapter will provide critical analysis of these media governance infrastructures and suggest that contemporary scholarship on media materiality and ecomedia needs to incorporate these perspectives much more prominently into their DNA to understand and address the complex realities of an industry balancing between external pressure to go green and internal cultural, processual, economic, and managerial challenges that impose considerable limits on their implementation.
