Municipal sport management and governance in Brazil: an index for municipalities

Introduction: Despite the increase in investment and attention given to sport, the evaluation on the public sport policies management is still less widespread than that on other sectors, such as health and education. Objective: This work aims to evaluate sport management in Brazilian municipalities through the development of a public management and sport governance index, the IGGE-M (Index of Management Public and Governance in Sport – Municipal). The IGGE-M was created based on 40 questions from the database of the Sports Intelligence Research Institute. Methodology: The data collected from the questions were grouped into four dimensions: (1) nature of the public body that manages sport in the municipality; (2) people; (3) planning; and, (4) transparency, participation and social control and each dimension had its own percentages established considering its importance. The data was analyzed based on the establishment of a ranking of municipalities based on the result from the sum of the percentages of the dimensions. Results: The results revealed that the management and governance of sport policies in Brazilian municipalities can advance a lot, especially regarding central elements of public governance, such as social control and participation. Conclusions: Given the IGGE-M proposed, we believe that it can contribute to support the analysis of sport management and governance in municipalities of other countries beyond the Brazilian context. The proposed index is unprecedented in the international context, with academic value and a practical contribution to municipalities’ sports policies.