Collaborative sport governance in IOC and the UN Women: A case study from the perspective of actor network theory

Introduction: Increasing complexities and changes in global sport governance required the collaboration of international organizations and governments, with traditional governance issues such as gender conflicts still persisted, while new conflicts continued to emerge, international organizations were not able to tackle governance challenges solely. Objective: The study focused on the collaborative governance between the International Olympic Committee and United Nations Women. Methodology: This study constructs diachronic corpus in the framework of actor-network theory, with which high frequency governance participants and keywords were analyzed via AntConc 4.2.4, while BibExcel and Ucinet 6.0 were employed to illustrate their heterogeneous networks, main problems faced in each period as well as participation in a chronological manner. Utilizing the Blau index and Ucinet 6.0, the study calculated networks’ heterogeneity index and density, exploring the development and mechanism of collaborative sport governance. Results: The collaborative sport governance revolved around female leadership, anti-violence and welfare; campaigns and programs need to integrate organizational governance, Olympic legacy inheritance, governmental gender equality, commercialization of sponsorship, etc; governance participants were the most diverse from 2017 to 2019 and exhibited the highest connectivity from 2020 to 2024, indicating that the diversity of participants in collaborative sport governance fluctuated with problems, but multilateral connections have witnessed a continuous steady increase. Conclusions: Governance participants need to balance interests and risks, adopt changes and seek common grounds while respecting differences, therefore forming a diverse, inter-connected, stable and sustainable mechanism for collaborative sport governance, and ultimately achieving gender equality.