Sustainability Strategy in Sport Organisations

Sustainability Strategy in Sport Organisations provides practical insights into the implementation of sustainability within sports organisations, based on multinational, multi-sport case studies.

The book addresses the challenge of translating general strategic sustainability concepts from international governing bodies into scalable, actionable plans for sports organisations across different countries and sports. The various cases are primarily assigned to one of the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, economic or social sustainability). In total, the book covers eleven cases from five different countries including Belgium, Finland, France, Sweden, the UK and the US. Finally, using the case study of a specific international governing body (World Athletics), it demonstrates how the implementation, broken down to the national level, can succeed across all areas of sustainability. The latter is illustrated using the example of Finnish Athletics and Athletics Flanders. The book is rounded off by introductory chapters on the current state of scientific knowledge regarding sustainability implementation in the respective sub-areas, as well as a general introduction to the challenges of sustainability implementation and a concluding summary. The aim is to illustrate the diverse challenges involved in implementing abstract sustainability concepts, depending on the sport, its links to sports policy, organisational capacity or the focus of key stakeholders, whilst also identifying best practices.

The book is aimed at academics in the fields of sports management and sports economics, as well as students in these disciplines and practitioners. In particular, the book seeks to bridge the gap between the current state of theoretical knowledge regarding the respective sustainability areas and the diverse practical case studies, thereby doing justice to the varied perspectives of the different stakeholder groups listed, as well as highlighting new angles.