Research on human rights and large-scale sport events from 1990 to 2022: a scoping review

ABSTRACT

Hosting large-scale sport events presents inherent human rights risks and opportunities across the event life cycle due to their size and complexity. Few studies on the planning, organising, management, and delivery of large-scale sport events incorporate a human rights perspective; however, human rights outcomes may be implicit in research on event impact, legacy, leverage, and event-led development. This paper presents a scoping review of the state of research on human rights and large-scale sport events in sport management and related fields for the time period 1990–2022. Specifically, our review identifies and maps existing scholarship on human rights issues, summarises findings, and highlights areas for future research. We utilised a range of scholarly articles, reports, and human rights instruments to develop a list of 14 human rights topics related to the study of large-scale sport events. Using the Joanna Briggs Institute’s scoping review framework, we searched 100 sport-related journals across 10 databases, yielding 279 articles. Our deduplication and data extraction processes were supported by DistillerSR project management software. We followed the PRISMA Scoping Review Extension guidelines to present our results. The most prominent human rights issues examined are equity and inclusivity and public health, well-being, and quality of life. In contrast, there was a dearth of research on issues, such as children’s rights and safeguarding and privacy rights of athletes, spectators, and consumers. Our review highlighted a need for more empirical and theory-driven scholarship in the area of human rights and sport events.

KEYWORDS:

• human rights
• sustainable development
• sport events
• event legacy
• scoping review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Joanna Briggs Institute is an international research organisation based at the University of Adelaide, Australia in the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. It develops evidence-based information, education, software, and training to improve healthcare practice.

² DistillerSR is a web-based project management software developed by Evidence Partners Incorporated (Ottawa, Ontario). It is designed specifically for conducting literature reviews. It allows for the importing of references, screening, full-text retrieval, data extraction, and reporting.

³ Year of publication denotes the year the article was published, that is, with a volume and issue number, or the year of advanced online publication at the time of article collection.

⁴ Concepts that were related and/or conflated were consolidated. For example, all types of event impact (e.g., tourism, social, economic) were just coded as “event impact”.