Beyond sports autonomy: a case for collaborative sport governance approaches

This article critically reviews the concept of sports autonomy. It argues that sports autonomy is of limited use for analysing and explaining the relationships between sports organisations and public authorities in diverse political and cultural contexts. Hence, the article proposes an alternative, advocating the use of collaborative governance theory as a conceptual framework to analyse the relationship between sports organisations and public authorities. We argue that comparative research on collaborative sport governance should employ the method of structured, focused comparisons tracing specific collaborations between public authorities and sports organisations.