A governance process lens for evaluating local public sport facilities: a multi-level conceptual framework

Local public sport facilities are not simply sites of infrastructure provision and service use. They are also shaped by governance through public steering, organizational mediation, and local decisions about resource allocation. Existing evaluation approaches remain fragmented. Studies often examine user experience, organizational performance, accessibility, or efficiency in relative isolation, with limited attention to how these concerns relate within local facility development. This study develops a multi-level conceptual framework for evaluating local public sport facilities through a governance process lens. The framework was derived through a structured conceptual synthesis of recurring strands in the literature and distinguishes three analytically distinct but operationally interdependent levels: community use, lived service experience, and user-valued outcomes at the micro level; organizational and managerial governance mechanisms at the meso level; and policy steering, resource allocation, accessibility, and system-level efficiency conditions at the macro level. Rather than proposing a universal scoring model, the framework provides an integrative architecture for understanding how these levels are related within the same public development process. It offers a governance-sensitive heuristic for future research, evaluation design, and local public steering.