‘They need to get the feeling that these are their ideas’: trusteeship in Norwegian Sport for Development and Peace to Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article analyses a Sport for Development and Peace organization’s production of discourse in the light of the concept of ‘development’. In particular, the idea of trusteeship and the power-effects that lie within this idea are addressed – meaning that someone has the knowledge, the skills and the funding to define themselves as developers on behalf of someone else. Through a single case study of the Norwegian Confederation of Sports’ development cooperation with the Zimbabwe Sport and Recreation Commission, we show how trusteeship was reproduced in the project’s formal discourse in policy documents and project plans.

Keywords:

• discourse
• post-development theory
• power-effects
• Sport for Development and Peace
• trusteeship

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their thanks to Knut Nustad, Matti Goksøyr and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in the process of writing this article.

Notes

1. Over the years, the rhetoric has shifted from sports aid, sports development aid, development through sport, sport-in-development and sport-for-development. In recent years, as the field has grown both in practice and in regard to research, Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) has become a common term, referring to what some researchers call a movement emerging after the year 2000. The case reported in this article was initiated in the early 1990s and is still running. As this article also relates to the SDP field today, the abbreviation SDP is consistently used throughout this article.

2. The common terms of the 1990s, developing country and developing world, will be used consistently in this article.