Governance within International Sport Organizations Case Study on the Chilean Olympic Committee

This master thesis deals with the wide subject of the governance with a focus on the Governance within International Sport Organizations for the literature review (theoretical part) and a Case Study on the Chilean Olympic Committee (practical part). In the introduction we start by presenting both the personal and societal motivations linked to this master thesis. We then present the research question which is the following: “Governance within international sport organizations and its evaluation criteria: can the SIGGS (Support the Implementation of Good Governance in Sport) project, a European initiative, be applied to the specific case of the COCh?” We follow our development by an exposition of the analytical method and clarify thanks to definitions some confusion between the concepts of governance, government and management. The theoretical part is dedicated to a review of the existing literature. This review presents the theme of governance in the first chapter mentioning its origins, giving some definitions as well and then moving to what we call ‘good’ governance and how to evaluate it. We discover the multiplicity of definitions of the concept because of its subjective characteristic and the absence of a universal definition concept of ‘good governance’. Still, it doesn’t mean that there is no convergence in the criteria chosen by the institutions to define this ‘good’ governance. We therefore present the similarities between different codes of governance mentioning some of them. We then narrow our target step by step to finally focus on the governance of the Not-For-Profit Organizations (NFPOs) of the sport sector and then on the governance in the Olympic institutions with a stress on the International Olympic Committee being the principal organization when dealing with sport bodies. Following the same path, we reduced our focus on our case study: the Chilean Olympic Committee. We summarize the broad lines of its functioning and expose its governance. The practical part starts with a presentation of our main tool for this empirical research, the SIGGS (Support the Implementation of Good Governance in Sport). Then we present the results obtained with the SIGGS in 7 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in Europe before doing the saem analysis for the COCh thanks to the fulfilment of an auto-evaluation by Jaime Godoy from the COCh. We complement and confirm it with a semi-structured interview of Neven Ilic Álvarez, the former president of the COCh. After that it is time for a comparison with the 7 European NOCs. We finish with some recommendations for both the COCh and these NOCs, before concluding on our master thesis, its limits and some suggestions for further researches.