Barriers and facilitators when hosting sporting events: exploring the Canadian and Swiss sport event hosting policies

The purpose of this paper was to compare and critically analyze the sport event hosting policies found within the different levels of government in both the Canadian and Swiss political systems (i.e. federal and municipal). Using a 'theorizing the transnational' technique, the global context was applied to the policy objectives (i.e. process, content, and outcomes) at the federal and municipal levels. Emergent themes represented similarities and differences in socio-economic, political, and the historical sport aspects in both countries. In addition, variations also surfaced in the policy process including actors and shaping institutions, policy content such as policy goals, instruments used to achieve those objectives, candidate eligibility, applicable events/sporting events, support and funding allocations, recipient criteria, final decision makers, and policy outcomes. While the existence of sport event policies creates advantages by reducing competition from other similar non-sport events and can force tighter ties between event organizing committees and other stakeholders of sporting events, event policies also create a number of barriers to potential sport event hosts such as the lack of adequate details available, accountability and business case preparation required, maximum amounts of total event funding available, 'holdbacks', as well as strict criteria and pre-condition/principles of the support.