New IOC-OECD guidelines to offer practical resources to help Games organisers deliver successful events
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are continuing their cooperation in the context of the organisation of major sports events. They have launched new guidelines to help the organising committees of large-scale international events navigate and manage the complexity of hosting these projects and help mitigate risks. They follow the recent publications aimed at measuring the long-term impacts of global events.
The “Guidelines on the Effective Delivery of Infrastructure and Associated Services in the Context of the Olympic Games” cover selected dimensions of specific challenges for the organising committees, such as institutional set-up and organisational management, sustainability and legacy, stakeholder and citizen participation, and programme management. In addition, they include good practices from previous Games organisers and lessons learnt from the procurement for large infrastructure projects.
During the drafting process, important input was provided by the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOGs) of Paris 2024, Milano Cortina 2026 and Los Angeles 2028 and the Organising Committee for the Youth Olympic Games Dakar 2026, all of which shared their experiences and best practices in this important field.
The guidelines come with an online toolkit which offers practical resources to support organisers in the effective delivery of major sports events. It includes a checklist to help sports event organisers identify areas to strengthen their delivery environment. This checklist can be applied to various contexts, from large infrastructure projects to international events, and would be useful to any organisation or committee tasked with delivering such projects.
The guidelines and the online toolkit (both also available in French) have been developed jointly by the IOC and OECD over the last three years.
In September 2023, the OECD issued two guides to assist global sports, business and cultural event organisers and their stakeholders in monitoring, measuring and evaluating the social, economic and environmental benefits of their events using robust and evidence-driven methodology. Developed in consultation with the IOC and other organisations, the guidelines are being pioneered by the IOC and OCOGs to enable consistent and reliable assessment of the legacy of different editions of the Olympic Games.
The IOC and OECD signed a memorandum of understanding in 2019, aimed at strengthening their collaboration on promoting ethics, integrity and good governance, as well as peace and sustainable development in sport. Within this framework, the two organisations collaborate closely as co-founding partners via the International Partnership Against Corruption in Sport (IPACS).
IPACS is a multi-stakeholder initiative, established in 2017, to bring together all the relevant stakeholders to coordinate and propose pragmatic solutions to fight corruption in sport. The focus areas of IPACS to date have been the procurement of infrastructure and associated services in major sports events, the selection process of major sports events, good governance and the cooperation between sports organisations, criminal justice and law enforcement authorities.