Sport and Sustainable Development: Setting a Research Agenda

On Global Sustainable Development Policy

Steven Bernstein, University of Toronto.

Watch the video here.

Abstract

The UN system inaugurated the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in September 2015. These 17 goals are meant to set the global development agenda for the next fifteen years, to 2030. Importantly, the SDGs widen the focus from just the global South to include all states. In this way, the UN recognizes the different, sometimes shared, sometimes integrated challenges faced in both global North and South countries – so tying environmental impacts to development processes and practices occurring worldwide. There is an obvious place for sport in the 2030 SDG agenda. Sport has impacts on the use of space and resources, as it does on contributing to community building, health and education. Do the SDGs present the possibility of more meaningfully integrating sport into development and environment agendas? Put differently, is it possible to map out an integrated sport-environment- development agenda, as opposed to just adding sport here and there and giving programs and projects a quick stir?

Author Bio

Dr. Swatuk is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development at the University of Waterloo. His current research interests focus on the unintended negative consequences of climate change adaptation and mitigation interventions, a concept he labels ‘the boomerang effect’. He is author of A Glass Half-Full: Water in Southern Africa, forthcoming from UKZN Press. Dr. Swatuk is also Adjunct Professor of International Development, St. Mary’s University, Halifax; External Research Fellow, Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax; Senior Research Fellow, Bonn International Centre for Conversion, Bonn, Germany; Visiting Professor, Institute for Water Studies, University of the Western Cape; and a Research Fellow of both the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Water Institute here in Waterloo, Ontario.

Watch the video here.

Watch the Q & A here.

Abstract

Sport-for-development programming has shown promise in supporting positive developmental outcomes for youth internationally. In Canada, research is beginning to accumulate with regard to the benefits of sport-based programming for Indigenous youth. Recognizing that connection to the land is an important traditional value within Indigenous culture and that this is related to their well-being, sport programs that incorporate an outdoor component may be better suited for enhancing positive impacts for Indigenous youth. Furthermore, developmental systems theory proposes that the bi-directional influences between an individual and their surrounding context drive development and as such outdoor recreation programming is uniquely suited to enhance Indigenous youth well-being and to engender opportunities for youth contribution through environmental activism. This chapter will highlight relevant research related to outdoor recreation programming for Indigenous youth as well as outdoor recreation programming designed to promote youth advocacy for the environment and will provide recommendations for future research and programming.

Author Bio

Tanya Halsall is a PhD candidate in the School of Human Kinetics at the University of Ottawa. Her primary research areas are in positive youth development, program evaluation and community-based research with First Nations, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) youth. Her specific research interests are in community-based participatory research and evaluation of sport-based programming for youth that promotes engagement, leadership and well-being. She has also been involved in evaluating system-level initiatives in child and youth mental health at the regional, provincial, national and international level. These collaborative initiatives have applied youth engagement strategies and placed a focus on the promotion of well-being in FNMI youth.

Watch the video here.

Abstract

In 1980, the elected band council of the Six Nations of the Grand River (Six Nations) passed a motion to create the community's first department of recreation. This department was tasked with the management of the community's existing sport facilities, as well as, the development of new facilities and the expansion of sport and recreation services and programs. Arguably, this decision served the community well. However, given current scholarship surrounding the concepts of colonization and decolonization, the continued development of sport and use of sport for development raises a number of issues for Indigenous peoples in their quest for sovereignty and self-determination. This presentation will discuss the current state of sport and recreation in the Six Nations community and some of the tensions and controversies that surround sport from an Indigenous perspective.

Author Bio

Daniel Henhawk PhD Candidate in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at the University of Waterloo. His research revolves around sport, recreation and leisure in the context of Indigenous communities. More specifically, he is interested in the issues that surround colonization, decolonization, Indigenization, self-determination and sovereignty. His research interests also broadly include narrative inquiry and the use of stories and storytelling as a means to examine the tensions between historical and contemporary understandings of leisure, sport and recreation in relation to Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Watch the video here.

Abstract

Programs in support of sport for development and peace have the potential to co-transform all participants in the event – those who come to share their knowledge of “sport” along with the participants who live in the communit(ies) engaged in these programs. Indigenous peoples in Canada have as one cultural strength their connectedness to the land. North American urban youth are increasingly detached from “near nature” and its associated benefits. SDP provides a unique opportunity for all those involved to deepen their connectedness to the environment while concurrently sharing ways of knowing their bodies through physical cultural practices such as sport. Drawing on a strengths and hope analysis, complementary Indigenous and settler ways of knowing the land and physical activities can be shared through SDP programs in a manner that co-transforms each of their ways of knowing and reflectively creates an awareness of local land-based practices that (can) inform and enhance physical cultural practices.

Author Bio

Dr. Paraschak has been a faculty member in Kinesiology since 1984. During this time, she has taught undergraduate courses primarily in Sociology of Sport, Government and Sport, Outdoor Recreation, Urban Outdoor Recreation and Social Construction of Leisure. At the graduate level she teaches Social Issues in Sport Management. Her research focuses on Aboriginal peoples and sport, and she has facilitated several workshops using a strengths perspective to help improve conditions for Aboriginal sport in Canada. She also has worked with the NWT government’s Sport and Recreation Division as a policy officer, and as a consultant facilitating various Directions Conferences. She recently completed a project linked to the 2007 Canada Winter Games in Whitehorse Yukon, and is currently working with “at risk” students of promise in Windsor high schools, using the outdoors to enhance their success in school and life.

Watch the video here.

Abstract

This presentation examines the intersections of golf, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and (international) development. The presentation begins by developing a spectrum of stakeholder responses to golf-related environmental concerns, with ‘pro-golf’ responses premised on total environmental control at one end and ‘anti-golf’ responses based on resistance to course construction projects at the other. In between lie ‘alter-golf’ responses, including those that, i) seek the 'greening' of golf without unsettling the game’s economic underpinnings, and ii) seek radical change in golf courses themselves and the supply chains that support them. We both theorise and provide examples of each of these four responses, giving consideration to golf-related international development work in the process. Our central argument is that a corporate environmentalist, ‘alter-golf’ response now prevails in the golf industry in a range of contexts, though not without contradictions – including contradictions akin to those highlighted by critics of sport-related (international) development efforts in general.

Author Bios

Brad Millington is a Lecturer in the Department for Health at the University of Bath. His research is focused mainly on two areas: health and fitness technologies and sport’s relationship with the environment. Brad is the co-author of The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the Environment (2016, with Brian Wilson, Manchester University Press). His work has been published in a range of scholarly journals as well, including New Media & Society, American Behavioral Scientist, The Sociological Quarterly, Geoforum and the Sociology of Sport Journal.

Brian Wilson is a sociologist and Professor in the School of Kinesiology at The University of British Columbia. He is co-author of The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the Environment (2016, with Brad Millington, Manchester University Press) and author of Sport & Peace: A Sociological Perspective (2012, Oxford University Press) and Fight, Flight or Chill: Subcultures, Youth and Rave into the Twenty-First Century (2006, McGill-Queen's University Press). His other writing focuses on sport, social inequality, environmental issues, media, social movements, and youth culture. He currently leads a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded project entitled “Fostering ‘Sport Journalism for Peace’ and a Role for Sociologists of Sport.”

Watch the video here.

Abstract

Sport for development and peace scholars have produced an impressive repository of research focused on sport utilized for socialization, social good, and individual and community relationships. It is important for this understanding and research not to be altered or abandoned, but be extended to include the possibilities that sport can have in impacting the human-nature interaction. There are a multitude of ways in which sport impacts and is impacted by the natural environment. In this presentation, I focus on introducing three research projects – one on international water development, one on sporting events, and one on youth sport carbon footprint – that speak to the opportunity for research, practitioners, organizations, and governments to leverage sport for educating individuals about water systems and air pollution, specifically, and how scholars can extend their research into this avenue.

Author Bio

Kyle S. Bunds, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management at North Carolina State University, where his research and teaching examines the connection between sport and the environment generally, and sport, water, and air pollution more specifically. His work, which is primarily grounded in political economic theory, has been published in numerous academic journals, including Sport Management Review; European Sport Management Quarterly; Sport in Society; Critical Studies in Media Communication; Communication, Culture, & Critique; Cultural Studies  Critical Methodologies; and Water Resources: IMPACT. In addition to his scholarship, Kyle has also guest edited a special issue on political economics for the Journal of Amateur Sport, and he is currently guest editing a forthcoming special issue on sport, physical culture, and the environment in the Sociology of Sport Journal.

Watch the video here.

Abstract

With some exceptions, current sport for development and peace (SDP) scholarship has mostly ignored ‘new materialist’ approaches that explore the role and agency of non-human actors as they shape the behaviours and attitudes of those on the ‘receiving end’ of SDP. In this paper, I draw on new materialist approaches to sport and physical cultural studies, combined with available literature on the role of non-humans in international development to unpack the linkages between gender-based violence and climate change in SDP programming in Nicaragua. To do this, I use postcolonial feminist participatory action research (PFPAR) – including visual research methods such as photovoice and digital storytelling – to better understand, and prioritize, how non-human actors impacted young Nicaraguan women’s experiences of climate change and gender-based violence as they participated in a SDP program used to promote environmental sustainability and improve their sexual and reproductive health rights. To conclude, I argue that we must better account for the broader physical environment in social and political life it shapes the lives of those on the ‘receiving end’ of SDP interventions.

Author Bio

Lyndsay Hayhurst is an Assistant Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include sport for development and peace, gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health in/through SDP, cultural studies of girlhood, postcolonial feminist theory, global governance, international relations and corporate social responsibility. She is a co-editor (with Tess Kay and Megan Chawansky) of Beyond Sport for Development and Peace: Transnational perspectives on theory, policy and practice, and her publications have appeared in Women’s Studies International Forum; Gender, Place & Culture; Third World Quarterly and Sociology of Sport Journal. She has previously worked for the United Nations Development Programme and Right to Play.

Watch the video here.

Watch the Q & A here.

Abstract

South Korea implemented the Green Growth (GG) as a national environmental policy in 2008. The government formulated the GG policy for “environmentally sustainable economic growth,” drawing upon the influence of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific’s GG approach. The policy cherished the two values of “green” and “growth” equally, and the approach directly applied to the Olympic bidding and staging for their 2018 Games. This study illustrates how the Korean government and the Olympic organizing committee utilizes the eco-modernist GG policy for their Winter Olympic Games. To do so, this study analyzes PyeongChang’s eco-modernist discourse and practice at three levels—institutional, technocratic, and cultural. Through the analyses, this study argues that Olympic mega-events in developing countries fail to stimulate a reflexive environmental reform, since the sporting events are used for economizing the ecology, and the green-technologies redirect the ecologizing of economy.

Author Bio

Kyoung-yim Kim has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Boston College since 2013. Kyoung-yim completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, Canada and her undergraduate studies at Korea National Sport University, South Korea. Her areas of specialization include gender, race, nation and sport with a focus on postcolonial and transnational feminist approaches. Some of her works, including a paper on women athletes’ transnational labor migration, and anti-colonial research methodologies in sport studies have been published and received recognitions from International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA—2011 Graduate Paper Award) and from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS—2013 Outstanding Article Award). Currently, she is working on biocolonialism in transnational golf industry, and environmental sustainability and urban planning around Winter Olympics, especially with the cases of 1998 Nagano and 2018 PyeongChang.

Abstract

After months of infrastructural woes, favela removals, and corruption scandals, it was the mosquito that almost spelled disaster for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. In this paper I ask how political ecology helps elucidate the interrelatedness of mega events and disease transmission in the so-called Global South. I follow the Zika-carrying mosquito to understand how it is always-already embedded within political, economic and social networks of power shaped, in part, by mega event developments. I look at two different scenes of vector impact: makeshift sites of relocation in which mosquitoes gather at pools of stagnant water; and public health campaigns to quell anxieties during heightened global attention. To conclude, I discuss how political ecology and Sport for Development and Peace complement one another: together, they draw attention to how power-laden mega event decisions affect the socio-material flows of seemingly distinct lifeworlds.

Author Bio

Carolyn Prouse is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation work focuses on technologies of 'slum-upgrading' in Rio de Janeiro. In general, Carolyn's research interests fall at the intersection of post/decolonial approaches, feminist studies, and critical race theories.

Sample content

Sample content

Sample content