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.

Aila Ahonen is a Principal Lecturer at JAMK University, School of Business (Finland). She is a manager of Sport Business by Jamk research and development unit and a programme coordinator of the Jamk Sport Business Management master programme. She lectures, writes, consults and conducts research in applied areas of sport business, sport entrepreneurship and sport events. Her research focus is on sport entrepreneurship and sport events. Aila is an editorial board member of Managing Sport and Leisure journal and Journal of Management and Business Education. She is the President of the European Association for Sport Management (EASM) and a member of the Finnish Sports Ethical Affairs Advisory Board, together with some commercial board positions.

Anton Behrens is a researcher at the University of Leipzig, Chair of Sports Economics and Sports Management, and completed his doctorate at the German Sport University in Cologne at the Institute of Sports Economics and Sports Management, Department of Sports Business Administration. He was awarded the prize for the best humanities dissertation at the German Sport University Cologne in 2021. His research focus is centred around changes in sport consumer behaviour due to general trends such as internationalisation, digitisation and environmentally conscious behaviour of sport fans. Since 2022 he is Secretary General of the European Association for Sport Management (EASM). Since 2024, he has been responsible for the International Trainer Courses (ITK) at the University of Leipzig in his role as project manager.