Sport, Development and Environmental Sustainability

Rob Millington, Simon Darnell, Rob Millington, Simon C. Darnell, Simon Darnell, Rob Millington, Simon C. Darnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351128605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first book to consider the intersections of sport, international development and environmental sustainability. It explores the tensions between sport's potential contribution to the environment and its rather poor record to date.

Bringing together a diverse group of scholars who approach the topic from various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, the book provides both critical and optimistic perspectives on the place of sport in sustainable development. Chapters examine and question how and whether sport contributes to sustainable development on an international scale. Attention is also paid to the place and role of Indigenous knowledge in sustainable Sport for Development, particularly as an alternative to modernization and/or in support of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

Sport, Development and Environmental Sustainability is important reading for academic researchers, students and policy-makers in the fields of kinesiology, sport studies, sport sociology, leisure studies, sport management, sport media, physical cultural studies, environmental studies and sustainability and international development studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Sport, development and environmental sustainability – issues and controversies

Rob Millington and Simon C. Darnell

Introduction

In October 2015, the United Nations (UN) announced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), designed to form the focus of global development through 2030. The SDGs marked a shift in development policy in at least two ways: first, the goals foregrounded environmental sustainability as a primary issue of international development, and made clear the need for environmental protection and remediation. Included in the SDGs are, for example: access to sustainable energy (SDG 7), sustainable industrialization (SDG 9), resilient and sustainable cities (SDG 11), sustainable consumption (SDG 12), action to combat climate change (SDG 13), conservation of the world’s oceans (SDG 14) and protection of the forests and biosphere (SDG 15). Second, the SDGs directly codified sport within international development policy for the first time, marking something of a point of culmination for the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector, the loose amalgam of organizations and stakeholders that advocate for sport in the service of international development and peace-building (Giulianotti, 2012). Indeed, beginning in the early 2000s, sport grew significantly within the development sector, thanks in large part to the UN’s institutionalization of sport for development and its creation of the position of Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on Sport for Development, and the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP).¹

During this time, organizations like the UN, as well as other SDP proponents, increasingly connected the use of sport to a range of development objectives, including poverty alleviation, HIV/AIDS education and gender equity. Notably, the environment also appeared to assume an increasingly important role in SDP, with the UN positing that sport could raise “awareness towards climate protection and … stimulate enhanced community response for local environmental preservation” and might even “make significant contributions to combat climate change” (United Nations, 2016, p. 14).

Accompanying this growth of the SDP sector was a series of rejoinders, particularly from the field of sport sociology, in which scholars critiqued the politics of evidence in SDP (Coalter, 2007; Nicholls, Giles, & Sethna, 2011), the influence of corporatization on the sector (Hayhurst, 2011; Hayhurst & Szto, 2016; Levermore, 2011), and even SDP’s complicity with neo-colonialism and social reproduction (Darnell, 2007; Hartmann & Kwauk, 2011). To date, however, there has been comparatively little critical analysis of environmental issues within the burgeoning SDP sector, or the role of sport with regard to environmentally sustainable development on an international scale. This oversight is significant given that the environment has been tied to matters of international development for decades, and has long been a focus of scholars within development studies (cf. Kirsch, 2010). Furthermore, as climate change has become a matter of global concern, environmental management and politics have emerged as a central focus of development policy, particularly given that “developing” polities are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change (cf. Adger et al., 2003).

This research gap in the relationship between sport, environmental sustainability, and international development was the impetus for hosting a research symposium in June 2017 at the University of Toronto entitled: Sport and Sustainable Development: Setting a Research Agenda. The main goal of the symposium was to bring together scholars in the fields of critical sport studies, development studies, political science and environmental studies to discuss the role that sport can (and should) play in efforts towards sustainable development. The subsequent aims of the symposium were threefold:

• To assess the current state of the field, and explore how environmental sustainability has been, or could be, included within the burgeoning field of SDP research;
• To consider the theoretical, political and historical points of intersections between these different disciplines;
• To identify areas of future research, and begin to develop a research paradigm for the field.

The collection of essays that comprise this book emerged from the symposium. They represent a diversity of scholarly assessments of the sport-development-environment nexus, and attempt to provide both a series of critical insights into the topic, while also proposing questions and concerns still to be explored. Through this Introduction, we aim to contextualize the chapters that follow by providing a discussion of the key themes that emerged from the symposium, as well as an overview of the tensions and controversies surrounding sport’s potential within efforts of sustainable development. We offer an assessment of the “state of the field” before discussing three central themes that we see as requiring further and ongoing attention within the SDP literature: the role that sport can or should play in promoting sustainable development, with a particular emphasis on environmental issues; the role that non-governmental organizations and federations from the field of sport might take up in this regard; and issues related to the intersection of sport and eco-justice. We conclude the Introduction by identifying some future areas of research as well as previewing the chapters that comprise the book.

Sport-development-environment: the state of the field

As noted, research into the relationship between sport, international development and the environment is both timely and called for because of the growth of the SDP sector in recent years. Beginning in the early 2000s, intergovernmental organizations like the UN began to recognize sport’s potential in contributing to international development. Over a relatively short period, hundreds of organizations began to mobilize sport in the service of international development, including non-governmental organizations like the Canadian-based Right to Play, corporations such as Nike and sporting federations like the International Olympic Committee, which in recent years have sought to connect the Olympic Games to broad-based development strategies for host nations.

However, despite this growth of SDP, it is only recently that environmental protection and remediation have been emphasized within the sector, and it is still somewhat rare for SDP organizations to focus primarily on the environment. As mentioned, this is curious from the perspective of international development studies, where the environment has been of crucial importance since at least the 1970s and in which global climate change is seen as nothing less than a threat to sustainable human life. The recent attention paid to the environment in SDP is also conspicuous given that the United Nations Environmental Programme used the popularity of sport in the 1990s to “promote environmental awareness and respect for the environment among the public, especially young people” and established environmental guidelines for sporting events such as the Olympic Games (Jarvie, 2012, p. 266). These guidelines eventually informed the International Olympic Committee’s environmental mandate, as well as programs and activities designed to “contribute to raising awareness about the importance of sustainable development in sport” (IOC, 2014), particularly for global South nations.

In turn, the recent attention paid to sustainability through frameworks like the SDGs can perpetuate the idea that the environment is a relatively new feature of international politics, when in fact the SDGs are but the latest attempt to bring attention to sustainable development. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, for instance, sought to bring together developed and developing countries to establish a global consensus on environmental issues. The conference resulted in the Stockholm Declaration, a set of 26 principles and 109 recommendations concerning the environment and development, including the need to safeguard natural resources and produce renewable forms of energy, and a mandate to contain and prevent pollution, while stressing the importance of environmental education (United Nations, 1972). In addition, one of the key themes to emerge from the conference was that development was central to environmental remediation, and that developing countries required assistance in this regard, particularly with environmental protection. Fifteen years later, the UN convened the Brundtland Commission to rally countries in collective pursuit of environmentalism in development. The Brundtland Commission popularized the term “sustainable development,” defining it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 41). This approach employed two key concepts:

The concept of “needs”, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

(WCED, 1987, p. 41)

Whereas previously the environment was understood to be separate from human action and development was typically defined within political or economic goals, the Brundtland Commission was instrumental in linking the two concepts. Five years later, the UN hosted the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit to focus on climate change, and largely set the stage for the Kyoto Protocol and eventually the 2016 Paris Climate Accord.

While the concern for the environment within approaches to international development is not new, the threat posed by climate change has significantly heightened the focus afforded to sustainability within international development policy and research. This has arguably necessitated a shift in development thinking and efforts, away from so-called “big picture” development policies, like efforts to “make poverty history” (see Cooper, 2007; Grant, 2015) or consumer-focused attempts to “make development sexy” (Cameron & Haanstra, 2008; Richey & Ponte, 2008), and towards more focused and coherent attention paid to sustainability. While a general withdrawal of the state, decline in multilateralism and concomitant rise in bilateralism has resulted in the NGO-ization of development, in which the number of actors with fragmented goals and competing policies has proliferated, the SDGs nonetheless represent an attempt to foreground the importance of the environment within the field of international development. Amidst this, the specific inclusion and recognition of sport in the SDGs was of clear significance. It was against this backdrop that participants in the Sport and Sustainable Development: Setting a Research Agenda symposium took up the question of sport, development and environmental sustainability. In what follows, we outline the three key themes which emerged from this two-day meeting.

What role can/should sport play in sustainable development?

The first and most pressing theme was the need to consider what role sport can or should play in efforts of environmentally sustainable development. Despite the efforts of organizations like the UN to connect sport to environmental protection and remediation, there remains a significant gap in the academic literature regarding the efficacy of these claims. Much of the support for sport’s potential to contribute to sustainable development policies and practices is based on a priori and often vague assumptions about the “power” of sport as a transformative force (see Donnelly, 2011; Hayhurst, 2009). Conversely, the existing research on sport and the environment has been almost entirely critical of sport’s impact on the natural environment, particularly the effects of hosting sporting events on natural landscapes, the levels of waste production and carbon footprints that sport produces, and the displacement of local habitats (and people) in order to build sports facilities (Bale, 1994; Chernushenko, 1994; Wilson & Millington, 2013).

Particular sports have received a great deal of attention regarding their impact on ecosystems. For example, the deleterious environmental effects of golf course construction and management have long been a focus for academics and activists who have drawn attention to issues of deforestation, clearing of vegetation, application of pesticides and over-use of water supplies (Briassoulis, 2010; Millington & Wilson, 2014, 2015; Neo, 2010). In response to the tide of environmental opposition since the 1960s, the golf industry took up an “environmentally conscious” approach in order to promote golf as a green and environmentally friendly sport that allows people to connect with nature (Briassoulis, 2010; Millington & Wilson, 2015). As we have noted elsewhere (Millington, Darnell, & Millington, 2018), this “environmentally friendly” shift in golf mobilized scientific discourses and presented a way forward for the golf industry whereby “technological advancement would not only afford cleaner and safer (or, at least, less risky) approaches to golf course development and maintenance, but also demonstrate the ability of non-state actors to self-monitor, thus erasing the need for oversight or burdensome legislation” (p. 11). This approach has most often been referred to as “ecological modernization,” recognized for its claims that the growth of the sport sector is compatible with environmental sustainability. However, many of the environmental efforts within the golf industry, similar to those of other corporate entities, have also been accused of engaging in “greenwashing,” whereby sport organizations and corporations attempt to market themselves as environmentally conscious and their products as sustainable without changing, or indeed ending, the policies and practices that fundamentally harm the environment (Lenskyj, 1998; Miller, 2016, 2018). In many ways, the golf industry’s promulgation of ecological modernization (and greenwashing) is emblematic of the sport industry, writ large.

With this history and track record in mind, there are questions as to what role, if any, sport can reasonably play in promoting environmentalism or achieving sustainability. Some stakeholders continue to argue that the global sport industry can and/or might raise awareness of environmental issues while mobilizing its immense resources in the service of environmental protection and remediation. Such claims should not be dismissed out of hand. Given its reach and global visibility, it may indeed be reasonable to pursue opportunities for sport to act as an “attractor discourse” for sustainable development, one that aligns with governmental policies and stakeholder needs (Mol, 2010). Further,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: sport, development and environmental sustainability – issues and controversies
• 2. Add sport and stir?: The SDGs and sport-environment-development
• 3. Golf, the environment, and development: past, present, and future
• 4. Approaching sport and the environment through immersive education technologies
• 5. Postcolonialism, pristine natures, and producing the village green: pastoral Englishness in Indian cricket-themed gated communities
• 6. From the IOC Sport and Environment Commission to Sustainability and Legacy Commission: the prospects for the environmental sustainability legacy of Olympic Games host nations under Agenda 2020
• 7. Ecological modernization in 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games: the elitist and unjust environmental performance
• 8. Of mosquitoes and mega-events: urban political ecologies of the more-than-human city
• 9. Neoliberalism and competitive nationalism: what the 2010 Commonwealth Games and 1982 Asian Games reveal about India’s development trajectory
• 10. Examining outdoor recreation as an approach to promote youth engagement in environmental activism
• 11. Indigenous peoples, sport and sustainability
• 12. Co-transforming through shared understandings of land-based practices in Sport for Development and Peace
• Index