Speakers
Description
The anti-doping fight is immersed in a process of international harmonization led by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) whose task is to create the regulations that must be applied by stakeholders (States, IF, and other members of the sport movement). Anti-doping regulations are renewed through consultation processes, presented as “democratic”, aiming to collect their contributions. This communication questions the extent to which the process is democratic. To this end, we study the process from the first decisions of the “drafting team” (a small group of "experts") to the final approval by stakeholders. More than 2000 comments made in the articles of the World Anti-Doping Code have been analyzed and semi-structured interviews have been conducted with anti-doping professionals from WADA from six different countries. The analysis borrows from sociology and law to study the process in its institutional dimension. Results show that constrained between a paradigm of efficiency and a quest for legitimacy, the consultation process is an “instrument” (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2004) that satisfies the “deliberative imperative” (Blondiaux & Sintomer, 2009) that WADA have to respect while maintaining strong control over the content of the text. WADA’s choice of prioritizing the consultation process is linked to its nature: it allows the concrete participation to a maximum of stakeholders, but at the same time, narrows the impact of their participation to the minimum publicly acceptable. The drafting team decides what articles will be modified, what contributions will be considered when writing the final version and negotiate with “key” stakeholders.
