Beyond the checklist: from compliance to culture – the LES relational framework for evaluating sustainability in film, TV & media production

Efforts to green the film, television, and media industries have largely focused on technical compliance–emissions reduction, energy use, and material impacts–often operationalised through checklists and certifications. While valuable for establishing baseline practices, these approaches risk reducing sustainability to a regulatory exercise, overlooking the cultural, narrative, and relational dynamics that shape systemic change. This paper introduces the Lifestyle-Embedded Sustainability (LES) model as a holistic framework that evaluates sustainability both as a technical outcome and as a cultural process expressed across production, content, lifestyle, and distribution. Building on the Sustainable Production Value Chain (Kohle 2022), LES incorporates lifestyle integration and ethical coherence to move beyond ‘green consumerism’ and address the systemic dimensions of the climate crisis. Applying LES to three case studies, the paper argues for a shift from sustainability as compliance to sustainability as culture, resisting neoliberal tendencies to individualise responsibility (2017) and offering a relational lens for transformative media production.