Environmental Sustainability in Belgian Sport Federations

Aim and research interest The awareness for environmental sustainability (ES) in sport is gradually increasing, resulting in more literature being published in the field (McCullough et al., 2020). However, to date, numerous important research domains remain unexplored. The environmental management of sport federations (SFs), for example, is little discussed. Yet, SFs are considered to be impactful actors that interact with a wide range of stakeholders and are, accordingly, potentially meaningful enforcers of ES (Sotiriadou & Hill, 2015; Zeimers et al., 2020). Furthermore, McCullough and colleagues (2020) noticed that, despite the considerable pressure to combat climate change, the environment is still too often taken for granted in managerial sport contexts. As a result, strategic environmental initiatives that are embedded in national SFs are still the exception rather than the norm. A profound strategic approach will, therefore, be an imperative next step to leverage the full potential and unique position of SFs. To assist the SFs, the aim of this paper is to map ES efforts in SFs and to analyse to what level these efforts are embedded into their organisational strategy. Theoretical background and literature review Currently, the literature on ES in SFs focused on international sport governing bodies like the International Olympic Committee (Paquette et al., 2011) or discussed ES from a general corporate social responsibility perspective (Zeimers et al., 2020). There is, also, literature available that examined the strategic management of ES in sport (Dingle & Mallen, 2021), but literature that addresses ES from a strategic perspective in national SF is scarce. McCullough, Pfahl and Nguyen (2016) created the environmental wave typology, which enables researchers to classify the initiation and development of ES in sport organisations. The authors built on the institutional theory and diffusion of innovation theory to understand the increased efforts of the sector a