International cross-sector social partnerships between sport and governments: The World Anti-Doping Agency

•WADA’s biggest management issues were financial collections and 2007 Presidential elections.•These issues threatened WADA’s internal and external legitimacy.•Legitimacy is key to CSSPs for external and internal reasons.•Geopolitical legitimacy is an important form of pragmatic legitimacy for international CSSPs.This article presents the results of an in-depth case study of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), a global cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) through which governments and sport collaborate to address the social issue of doping in sport. The authors specifically explore how WADA has managed two key issues (securing financial contributions and the 2007 presidential election) using institutional and resource-dependence theories to better understand the question of why and how a sport CSSP responds strategically to its environmental and resource constraints in its precursory, establishment, and continuance phases. In doing so, the authors contribute to the sport management literature by providing new theoretical insights in the context of an international CSSP whose governance model challenges traditional management theories (Selsky & Parker, 2005) and is increasingly relevant in the current era of global management of social issues (Scherer & Palazzo, 2010). Findings suggest that for global CSSPs internal and external legitimacy is imperative through securing moral and geopolitical legitimacy, and there is value in considering resource-dependence and institutional theories as complementary rather than competing frameworks.