Strategic governance of sports tourism for urban competitiveness: an integrated model for sustainable city development

This study examines how strategic governance of sports tourism can enhance urban destination competitiveness in institutionally constrained contexts. Drawing on Institutional Theory and the Resource-Based View (RBV), the research aims to develop and empirically validate an integrated model that explains how governance structures shape sports tourism resources and long-term urban competitiveness. Adopting a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design, the study combines semi-structured interviews with 15 national and urban-level experts and Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) based on evaluations from 26 specialists. The findings reveal a seven-level hierarchical structure in which integrated policy and governance frameworks serve as foundational drivers, enabling resilient infrastructure, strategic event portfolio management, cultural – heritage synergy, and digital transformation. These governance-conditioned resources subsequently g’enerate higher-order outcomes, including community support, economic vitality, urban regeneration, global competitive positioning, and sustainable adaptive capacity. By empirically demonstrating that sports tourism competitiveness is contingent on governance coherence rather than event scale alone, the study advances three key contributions. First, it offers a governance-centred, hierarchical explanation of how sports tourism resources are strategically orchestrated to produce durable urban competitiveness. Second, it extends the application of Institutional Theory and RBV to the urban scale within a non-Western developing context. Third, it provides a context-sensitive decision-support framework for policymakers seeking to align sports tourism development with sustainability and long-term urban resilience. While grounded in the Iranian context, the identified governance mechanisms offer analytical insights transferable to other institutionally complex cities.