The “movement summit” presented with great praise by the federal government and the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) has come to a standstill after fourteen months. The draft of a “sports development plan”, which, according to the coalition agreement, should be “the first nationwide strategy to promote exercise and sport for all people” and an “offensive for investments in sports facilities (…) taking into account sustainability, accessibility and inclusion”. , the Federal Ministry of the Interior under Nancy Faeser withdrew after sharp protests from the DOSB.
At the second “movement summit”, planned for March 12th in Berlin, an agreement between the state and sport is no longer expected. The Ministry of the Interior is therefore talking about initially developing a “sports development plan” for the federal government alone and foregoing the agreement with DOSB and the states. For this purpose, a cooperation center is to be set up at Faeser.
This development is an example of sports policy at the federal level in the last two to three years, criticizes Christoph Niessen, CEO of the State Sports Association of North Rhine-Westphalia: “The aim was nothing less than to reorganize sport in Germany with a sports development plan, a center for safe sport and Competitive sports agency.
Disillusionment and disappointment
Elaborate participation processes were started, mostly under the leadership of the BMI, always accompanied by external agencies and with a lot of fanfare. As a result, in my opinion, none of the projects are likely to achieve their objectives in the original sense.”
CDU MP Jens Lehmann (Leipzig), a member of the sports committee, also sees no progress: “The federal government is on a bad path when it comes to sports policy. The Ministry of the Interior should try to reach an agreement with sport and the states.” In November, the Federal Audit Office initially criticized the plans to outsource top-level sports funding to an independent agency due to a lack of control by Parliament, then the Budget Committee stopped the establishment of the agency planned for 2024 Agency.
The failure of the “Sports Development Plan” has caused disillusionment and disappointment: “We don’t want declarations of intent,” said Kerstin Holze, Vice President of the DOSB: “We want clear responsibilities and that these are backed by resources.” The participation process has produced good results, and She recognizes that the Interior Ministry takes sport’s comments seriously.
The failure of the “Sport Development Plan” under Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser has caused disillusionment. : Image: dpa
But instead of developing a national, long-term campaign to promote sport as a joint task for all departments, the DOSB believes that a catalog of arbitrariness has been created under the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior. As well as the lack of commitment and lack of funding, the DOSB criticizes the fact that responsibility for individual measures is not assigned. In a position paper, the umbrella organization and its youth organization dsj rejected the plan from Berlin outright.
The reason: It will have no effect. “Especially against the background of the voluntary and full-time resources that have been brought in by organized sports, the present draft is more than disappointing,” write DOSB and dsj.
Since December 2022, five working groups had developed ideas and concepts, many of which are not reflected in the draft. Karl Lauterbach’s Ministry of Health, which was involved in the first exercise summit, dropped out of the joint planning and founded a round table “Exercise and Health” with many participants. One thing didn’t find a place: sport.
Below expectations
“The stated goal was nothing less than to anchor the fields of sport and physical activity promotion across departments at all political levels as a cross-sectional task and to position them in the best possible way for the future and to implement the most innovative, sustainable and promising proposals on a broad scale from 2024,” writes the DOSB: “ However, it has already become clear in some working groups that there is only limited political will to initiate a turnaround, as it was pointed out that resource-intensive measures could not be implemented and were therefore not included in the results papers.
The BMI’s draft falls short of the expectations of organized sport and the obligations arising from the coalition agreement and the summit declaration. Nine federal departments, two state conferences, three municipal umbrella associations and DOSB/dsj signed the summit declaration, the basis for the sports development plan, fourteen months ago.
The DOSB complains that savings in the budgets of the federal ministries and the states have reduced the idea of the “Sport Development Plan” to absurdity. An example is the reduction in the federal program for the energy-efficient renovation of municipal facilities for sport, youth and culture. The Ministry of Construction is only making 200 million euros available for this.
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Applications cannot be submitted. According to the DOSB, solving the renovation backlog in sport costs more than 30 billion euros. Not taking into account the poor condition of the sports facilities and the additional costs for decarbonization measures essentially calls into question the seriousness of the “Sport Development Plan”.
