Governance and Anti-Doping: Beyond the Fox and the Hen House

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was created in 1999 and plays a key role in ensuring consistency of anti-doping policies and regulation around the world. In doing so, two of the core values that guide this agency are accountability and integrity with an emphasis on the independent and unbiased judgement of the organisation. However, a closer review of WADA’s structure highlights that the focus of the organisation is on external accountability: the agency is accountable to its funding bodies. This raises a question regarding the internal accountability of the organisation, a concept that has attracted little attention from commentators and academics. Accordingly, this Chapter considers the governance of WADA and puts forward reform proposals to enhance the transparency, accountability and integrity of this agency. The question of governance is especially important as the adoption of good governance principles by WADA may lead to a top down change to regulation and governance of sporting organisation around the world. This would enhance trust in and accountability of sporting organisations. In putting forward the recommendations, the literature on corporate governance will be canvassed to assess which good corporate governance policies and guidelines WADA is able to adopt to improve its operation mode.