The impact of austerity on poverty and sport participation: mind the knowledge gap

ABSTRACT

This paper will try to address the question why, to this date, empirically we still know relatively little about the impact of austerity policies in relation to sport (non-)participation of people living in poverty. It is reasonable to assume that austerity measures spanning over many life and policy domains, such as, housing, energy costs, transport, employment, healthcare, social welfare, childcare, education, pension, public services, sport provisions, etc., might have had an impact on the leisure participation opportunities and outcomes of people in poverty. However, such assumptions remain under-researched. I will put forward the following potential reasons for the current knowledge gap: (1) the conceptual broadening and hollowing out of ‘poverty’; (2) the failure to situate sport participation within wider life and policy domains; (3) the difficulty to measure organised sport participation of people living in poverty through existing sport participation surveys; (4) the acute lack of systematic problem and policy analyses in terms of the impact of austerity measures on people living in poverty; and (5) the reluctance of sport and leisure academics to use critical political analyses of austerity policy measures. We need to develop a better understanding of the impact of austerity policies and a welfare state rollback on the general leisure opportunities and outcomes of people in poverty, to help inform policymakers about the (unintended) outcomes of austerity policies on multiple life domains, of which sport is just one of many.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity
• leisure
• policy
• poverty
• sport participation
• social class

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dan Parnell (Manchester Metropolitan University) for his support and feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Furthermore, I am thankful for the valuable comments of the two reviewers. Finally, a word of gratitude to Zeno Nols for offering his advice in the early stages of my thinking about the theme of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reinhard Haudenhuyse

Reinhard Haudenhuyse is a Researcher at the Sport & Society Research Unit, Department of Sport & Movement Sciences  (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and research fellow of the Voicing Young People At-Risk Research Group (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).