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Abstract
In recent years, national and international sports organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and schools have conducted programmes in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the disadvantaged communities of the First World to assist sports development (e.g. Olympic Solidarity), humanitarian relief (e.g. Right to Play), post-war reconciliation (e.g. Playing for Peace), and broad social development (e.g. CitationKicking AIDS Out). These initiatives, linked under the banner of ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP), have been prompted by athlete activism and an idealist response to the fall of apartheid, and enabled by the openings created by the end of the Cold War, the neo-liberal emphasis upon entrepreneurship and the mass mobilizations to ‘Make Poverty History’. A major focus of policy development has been the United Nations, the SDP International Working Group, and the Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport. This essay sketches out the landscape of this new movement, critiques the problems and considers the prospects.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Peter Donnelly, Kathy Hare and Lorna Reid for their helpful comments. Of course, any errors or omissions are entirely my own.
Notes
1 http://www.kickingaidsout.net; http://www.unicef.org/football/world/index.html; http://www.peaceplayersintl.org; and http://www.mysakenya.org.
2 The way to refer to such countries is extremely contentious among scholars and policy analysts. Among the terms in common use are: developed/developing nations; global North/global South; majority world/minority world; and countries with developing economies. Although ‘global South’ enjoys wide support, it nevertheless glosses over the considerable differences between countries and groups within countries. In a recent set of literature reviews conducted for the International Working Group on Sport for Development and Peace, my colleagues and I at the University of Toronto settled on the term, ‘Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Low-income and middle-income countries are sometimes referred to as developing economies. The term is not intended to imply that all economies in the group are experiencing similar development or that other economies have reached a preferred or final stage of development. Classification by income does not necessarily reflect development status. See CitationKidd and Donnelly, Benefits of Sport in International Development.
4 http://www.sportanddev.org/en/index.htm. This must be considered a select sample. Not all organizations have made the link to the International Platform; moreover, many organizations in LMICs do not have website capacity.
5 E.g. CitationCavallo, Muscles and Morals; CitationPutney, Muscular Christianity; CitationGems, ‘Sport, Religion and Americanization’; and CitationKruger and Riordan, Story of Worker Sport.
6 CitationPitter and Andrews, ‘Serving America's Underserved Youth’.
7 CitationMacAloon, ‘Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds’; CitationMangan, Games Ethic and Imperialism; and CitationGems, Athletic Crusade.
8 CitationGruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 46.
9 CitationRight to Play, ‘History of Right to Play’.
12 E.g. CitationUnited Nations, ‘Convention on the Rights of the Child’; CitationInternational Working Group on Women and Sport, ‘Brighton Declaration on Women and Sport’; and CitationInternational Council on Sport Science and Physical Education, ‘The Berlin Agenda for Action’.
13 Other athlete-initiated developmental organizations include Athletes 4 Change, Athletes for Africa, Athletes United for Peace, Concrete Hoops and the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation.
14 CitationUnited Nations, Inter-Agency Task Force on Sport for Development and Peace, Sport for Development and Peace.
15 They include: , ‘General Assembly Resolution 58/5’; ‘Final Report’; ‘Sport for Development and Peace: The Way Forward’; and ‘Sport in the United Nations Convention’. The International Platform on Sport and Development provides a comprehensive listing of these and other relevant documents; see http://www.sportanddev.org/en/browse-by-type-of-document/united-nations-documents/index.htm.
16 See the Sport for Development and Peace International Working Group site at http://iwg.sportanddev.org/en/index.htm.
17 CABOS, ‘Report January 2006’.
18 See CitationKidd and Donnelly, ‘Human Rights in Sports’.
19 E.g. CitationCoalter, Sport-in-Development; CitationNCDO, Lessons Learned; and CitationUNICEF, Monitoring and Evaluation of Sports-based Programming.
20 E.g. For accounts of ‘best practice’, see CitationKidd and Donnelly, Benefits of Sport in International Development; CitationSport England, ‘Value of Sport Monitor’; CABOS, ‘Report January 2006’; and International Platform on Sport and Development, http:/www.sportanddev.org.
21 CitationInternational Labor Organization, ‘Common Framework for Partnership on Sport and Local Development’.
22 CitationPitter, ‘Midnight basketball’.
23 CitationVeii and Howells, ‘Building Global Partnerships’.
24 CitationKidd and Donnelly, Benefits of Sport in International Development, 4–5.
25 For a particularly insightful analysis of the ‘protection hypothesis’, see CitationFasting et al. , ‘Participation in College Sports’.
26 See my proposal for such a corps in Citation‘A New Orientation to the Olympic Games’.