Navigating Sustainability Dilemmas in Decision-Making for Sports Facilities

Every year, sports facilities for around 5 billion NOK are built in Norway. The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) aim to take responsibility for the environment while planning, designing, constructing, operating, and maintaining sports facilities. There will always be dilemmas between the three dimensions of sustainability in decision-making processes. This research aims to illustrate different dilemmas and show how they should be dealt with when planning new sports facilities. This will help doing more informed decisions. The main objective of new sports facilities is to create activity, which creates value for users and the society. We have, through some examples, showed some dilemmas between sustainability’s social, economic, and environmental dimensions. A dilemma is how to plan, design, and construct more environmentally friendly facilities that still support the increased activity within a limited amount of funding. The “Sustainability Check” is presented as a tool, where the impact from the sports facility on the UN’s 17 sustainability goals is evaluated. But it lacks a way of weighting the different criteria. A further development suggested is to integrate the “Sustainabililty Check” with a multi-criteria decision-making method like Choosing by Advantages. More research is needed to test this integration.