In 2019 the Edinburgh Festivals and Festivals Forum stakeholders launched a mid-term review of their previous strategy and began developing a new future vision reflecting on the latest opportunities and challenges. After the Covid-19 pandemic struck, this work was updated to propose principles for how the festivals and the festival city could rebuild and support wider renewal in a changed era.

The festivals needed to adapt while holding onto fundamental purposes. they identified their unique value as being to connect people, inspire creative ideas, and bring places alive in concentrated moments of communal celebration – focused on combining the local, the global and the live.

A series of collective conversations gathered feedback from local residents through Community Councils, from artists and creatives through Creative Edinburgh, and from businesses through Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. This was part of a wider period of reflection and rethinking by

individual festivals and others at local, national and international levels.

The result of this collective internal research and external discussion is our agreed 2030 Vision to be a world leading sustainable festival city, with six ambitions to protect and develop our position encompassing shared values of being globally minded, locally rooted, and creatively led.