Transparency in the Allocation of Municipal Grants for Sports and Voucher Systems in the Czech Republic

This paper will assess transparency in the decision-making process in sports grants allocation. In comparison with other parts of the public sector, surprisingly little is known about transparency in the sports sector. An increasing portion of public funds is spent on sport grants; this establishes the necessity for research. Can any positive effects of sports grants be expected to appear without transparency in the decisionmaking process? An examination of the process in reality is crucial for future public resources allocation. Based on the general assumption that NGOs are important actors in economic and political development, we address the Czech Republic at the municipal level.

The main goals of this paper are to assess the transparency of the allocation of public grants for sport organizations on the municipal level in the Czech Republic and to discuss one possible method for improving system transparency and efficiency: vouchers.

We discuss sport vouchers as a possible tool for improving transparency. Vouchers solve the problem of transparency in the decision-making process by transferring the purchasing power to the client. Although using sports vouchers as a tool for allocating public resources is quite rare, there are a few examples of this practice in the Czech Republic. We established two research questions: (1) Do sport clubs perceive the allocation of sport grants at the municipality level as transparent? (2) Do sport clubs consider a voucher system as helpful for the transparency? To answer these questions, we discuss the theory and specific conditions in the Czech Republic; we perform a survey among sport clubs and we examine examples of voucher implementation; and we discuss the general consequences of our results.