Can sport make the world a better place? That is the question guiding the social scientific investigation of the sport for development and peace sector (SDP), jointly led by the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education and Loughborough University in the UK.
Although SDP is experiencing rapid growth, with hundreds of programs and organizations across the world using sport as a tool to promote development, peace, human rights and social justice, little is known about how it is experienced in diverse cultural contexts.
This project investigates SDP initiatives in Kosovo, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Rwanda and Zambia, making it the first substantial comparative study that investigators hope could lead to more robust policies, practices and strategies in the field.
KPE Assistant Professor Simon Darnell shared more details about the study’s key findings and recommendations.
What were the key issues you were looking at in terms of SDP programming in these 5 regions of the world?
The project had three main objectives. The first was to develop a better understanding of how key issues in international development are approached and addressed through the use of sport. For this, we focused on human rights, peace-building and persons with a disability, as these are topics that all receive important attention in development more broadly, but haven’t always been addressed through sport or in the context of SDP. The second objective was to conduct a comparative assessment. We wanted to know whether (and how) SDP is organized similarly and/or differently in different regions of the world. The third objective was to investigate how the SDP sector is structured globally, particularly in and through the relationships between local organizations and the international bodies (like the United Nations) and funders (like Comic Relief) that support them.
What did you find were the greatest similarities and, conversely, differences between the programs and why?
In general, we’ve found that communities, countries and regions around the world have a similar understanding of sport and its social significance. However, the ways in which sport is organized and implemented to meet development goals differs around the world, primarily because development issues and challenges are contextually specific. For example, ‘peacebuilding’ in Sri Lanka and Rwanda tends to focus on reconciliation, after the civil war and genocide respectively. In Jamaica, however, we found peacebuilding to be more focused on pursuing anti-violence, and insulating young people from the violence they might encounter, particularly in a city like Kingston. So, one of our take home messages from this study is that specific development issues require specific sport-based approaches.
How did these differences reflect on the SDP goals, such as youth empowerment, gender equality and conflict resolution? What effect did they have on inclusion at a larger societal level?
Most of the organizations we worked with on this study have done some form of monitoring & evaluation and (not surprisingly) all are confident that the work they are doing is having an important impact. Clearly, young people’s lives are being positively affected by many of these SDP programs operating around the world, and, in general, SDP seems to be moving more towards programs based on local needs rather than presumptions. The question of scale still needs to be addressed, though. If a small SDP program is reaching dozens of kids, and those kids are experiencing meaningful results, this doesn’t necessarily or automatically lead to larger societal changes. This is why SDP scholar Fred Coalter warns against ‘displacement of scope’ whereby we are tempted to take micro experiences and assume that they have macro effects. This isn’t to say that the positive experiences of small numbers of young people don’t matter – of course they do. However, measuring the societal impact of these experiences is difficult and takes time. Indeed, some of the research questions coming out of SDP activity are going to take years to address.
What do you take from that?
What we take from that is that sport programs have important contributions to make, but they are not a panacea for development, nor can they singlehandedly solve longstanding or generational issues of violence and inequality. Rather, sport needs to be part of long-term, sustainable and holistic approaches to the challenges of international development. This is why the inclusion of sport in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and 2030 Agenda is so significant. It signals that sport is part of a broader international development mandate, rather than a solution in and of itself.