‘Athletes’ participation in the National Anti-Doping Organisations of Germany and Poland: democratic governance?’

ABSTRACT

Athletes’ participation in sports governance gains momentum at multiple levels and challenges the long-prevailing power relations in organised sport. At the same time, the sport-specific discourse on good governance extends to the field of anti-doping, following low levels of testing effectiveness, untransparent decision-making and ethical misconduct in leading anti-doping authorities. Adopting a case-oriented comparative approach between the National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) of Germany (NADA) and Poland (POLADA), two consecutive data collection steps were applied in mixed-methods design to assess and compare the status quo, and to discuss the future development of athletes’ participation in anti-doping through the lens of democratic processes in good governance research. First, document analysis showed important similarities and differences between the organisations’ approaches to athletes’ participation. Overall, NADA implements a more democratic and transparent approach than POLADA. Second, expert interviews revealed three key issues in relation to democratic forms of athletes’ participation in the two NADOs: athletes’ and their representatives’ (limited) personal resources and engagement (individual); an adequate degree of codification and institutionalisation of athletes’ representation on NADOs’ internal bodies (organisational); and NADOs’ operational (in-)dependence (political/systemic). Researchers and practitioners are recommended to further examine how NADOs’ control functions over athletes and athletes’ participation in their decision-making can be adequately balanced as part of aspirations to foster democratic governance in these organisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Doping
• national Anti-Doping organisations (NADOs)
• good governance
• democratic processes
• participation
• athletes’ rights

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the representatives of the National Anti-Doping Organisations of Germany (NADA) and Poland (POLADA) and the other interview participants for sharing their precious time and thoughts. The authors are also thankful to Play the Game for facilitating further research analysis based on the Erasmus+ “NADGO” project.

Disclosure statement

The second author forms part of POLADA’s Research Team as of May 2023.

Data Availability Statement

Data that support the findings of this study are available from the two authors upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. ‘Effectiveness’ (understood as a high degree of goal attainment) refers primarily to a NADO’s overall policy/governance effectiveness in relation to its organisational mission, i.e. the goal to detect/deter doping (cf. Singer 2014, Schmelzle and Stollenwerk 2018).

2. More detailed country profiles of the national sport and anti-doping systems of Germany and Poland can be found in previous work from Hallmann and Petry (2013) and Geeraert (2021b).

3. To account for the increasing pluralism in matters of athletes’ representation (cf. Mittag et al. 2022), two sub-groups were formed.

4. The criteria are effective participation, voting equality at the decisive stage, enlightened understanding, control over the agenda, and inclusion.

5. Two representatives of NADA’s senior management staff participated in this interview.

6. Data was translated using the software ‘DeepL Pro’ (Kutylowski 2021).

7. POLADA’s Council is not a supervisory board in the stricter sense and rather takes advisory functions (Zembura 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The parent study (i.e. the ”NADGO”-project) was funded by the European Commission Erasmus+ Programme under grant number 603273-EPP-1-2018-1-DK-SPO-SCP.