Elite Sport Development

Policy Learning and Political Priorities

Mick Green, Barrie Houlihan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134322039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Elite Sport Development addresses important sport policy questions and explores the emergence, development and current status of elite sport development policy with detailed examination of Australia, Canada and the UK. The sports compared are swimming, track and field athletics, and sailing.

The book looks at the problems faced in establishing an elite sport development infrastructure covering facilities, coaching, sports science and competition. Likewise, full-time athletes are considered and the tensions that a pre-occupation with elite achievement generates within the sports is also examined. Includes:

* why governments invest heavily in elite sport
* the relationship between Government and NGB's
* the impact of elite investment on 'sport for all'
* the selection of individual sports for priority funding.

This detailed text will be of interest to students, researchers and professionals working in sports development and policy.

1 Investigating elite sport policy processes and policy change

Over the last 40 years at least there has been an increasing awareness among governments of the value of elite sporting success. More often than not elite success has been seen as a resource valuable for its malleability and its capacity to help achieve a wide range of non-sporting objectives. For the USA, USSR and the European communist countries sport was a tool for demonstrating ideological superiority and for East Germany it had the additional utility of aiding the country’s claim to sovereignty. More recently, international sporting success has been variously valued for the national ‘feel good’ factor that it generates, for its capacity to deliver economic benefits through the hosting of major events, and for its general diplomatic utility. Needless to say, governments soon recognised that if they were to maximise some or all of these benefits they had to be able to guarantee that they had a squad of elite athletes capable of winning medals.

For a number of years it was possible to be confident that the key structural factors of economic prosperity and a large population would be sufficient to ensure medal success at the Olympic Games. As Stamm and Lemprecht (2001) noted, between 1964 and 1980 half the variation in the success of countries at the Olympics could be explained by three variables: population size; duration of International Olympic Committee (IOC) membership (as an indicator of depth of sporting tradition); and the level of economic development. A fourth variable, a communist government, was a further significant indicator. Since 1956, the most successful 10 per cent of countries at the Olympic Games have accounted for between 64 per cent and 83 per cent of all medals. In the Sydney Games 20 countries accounted for 72 per cent of all medals. The picture is similar for the winter Olympics. In 1956, the most successful 10 per cent of countries won 47 per cent of all medals. By the Salt Lake City Games of 2002, the figure had risen to 67 per cent. Over this period the composition of the 10 per cent most successful countries has changed little in both the summer and winter Games. In the 2000 and 2002 Games the most successful countries fell into one of two groups. With the exception of Ethiopia they were either rich industrial countries or former/ current communist countries.

Despite the consistency with which the rich and populous countries dominate the medal tables, there is a constant need for their governments to ensure the continued availability of the resource—the athletes—that allows them to exploit to their advantage their position in the medal tables or to bid successfully to host the Games. Although ‘big and rich countries are still at a considerable advantage when it comes to international sport’ (Stamm and Lemprecht 2001:135) these traditional sports powers have increasingly sought to maintain their relative advantage by adopting more systematic, professional and science-based approaches to elite athlete development (cf. Green and Oakley 2001a; Whitson 1998). Governments have shown a considerable willingness to devote significant sums of public or government controlled money (e.g. national lotteries) to the maintenance or improvement of elite sporting success. The United Kingdom (UK), for example, spent around £120 million establishing a regional network of elite sports institutes as well as approximately £100 million in the four years prior to the Sydney Olympics supporting approximately 600 athletes. Other countries have invested similar sums. Hogan and Norton (2000) calculated that between 1980 and 1996 the Australian government spent $AUS0.918 billion and won 25 Gold medals and a total of 115 Olympic medals at an average cost of $AUS37 million for each Gold medal and $AUS8 million for each general medal.

The achievement of international, and especially Olympic, sporting success is increasingly important to a growing number of countries. In recent years governments have become more willing to intervene directly in the elite development process requiring substantial changes on the part of national sporting organisations (NSOs) and national governing bodies (NGBs) of sport (professional management, high quality coaching, and talent identification programmes for example) as a condition of grant aid. This book provides an analysis of the shifts in elite policy in Australia, Canada and the UK in three sports—swimming, athletics and sailing/ yachting.¹

In Australia, the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in 1981 and the creation of the federal government agency—the Australian Sports Commission (ASC)—in 1985 have, arguably, been the clearest manifestations of the country’s desire to reverse its ‘slide in international sporting competitions’ (Adair and Vamplew 1997:93). Importantly, a large degree of political consensus across the country’s two main political parties underpinned these developments. What has emerged in the intervening years is a systematic, planned and increasingly scientific approach to developing the country’s elite athletes. Yet, a recurrent and significant theme in the development of Australian sport policy is the discourse surrounding the relative funding allocations for mass participation initiatives and those for elite sport programmes. Indeed, an examination of Australian public policy since 1975 reveals an apparent reluctance to address both sport policy goals with equal commitment (Armstrong 1997; Booth 1995; Nauright 1996). In short, as Hogan and Norton note, funding has been targeted towards ‘the skill development of talented athletes in the continuum of elite athlete “production”’ (2000:215–16). In Chapter 4, we draw out some of the key consequences of this policy approach for the sports of swimming, athletics and sailing.

In Canada, beginning in the 1970s, the federal government was responsible for the construction of a policy framework that underpinned the establishment of a cadre of elite athletes capable of achieving medal-winning success at major international sporting events, most notably at the Olympic Games² (cf. Macintosh and Whitson 1990). The unintended consequences of this drive for sporting excellence in Canada were brought into sharp relief with the Ben Johnson drugs affair at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. What followed, was a number of inquiries into the values and belief systems underpinning Canadian sport, in general, and Canadian high performance sport, in particular (cf. Blackhurst et al. 1991; Canada 1992; Dubin 1990). The subsequent debate over the values/belief systems under-pinning the country’s ‘sport delivery system’ (cf. Thibault and Harvey 1997) resulted in the changing emphases evident in the new Canadian Sport Policy (Canadian Heritage 2002) and subsequent legislation, An Act to Promote Physical Activity and Sport—Bill C-12 (House of Commons of Canada 2002). In short, in Canada there is evidence of a significant shift in policy direction and emphasis at the federal level, the ramifications of which are dealt with in more depth in Chapter 5.

With regard to the UK, policy priorities towards developing a framework of support systems for elite level athletes have, traditionally, been rather more ambiguous. Yet, two factors in particular are central to the changing direction and emphasis of sport policy in the UK since the mid-1990s. First, in 1994, the National Lottery was introduced with sport being one of five ‘good causes’ to benefit from the monies raised. The significance of Lottery monies for the emergence of a more systematic approach to developing the country’s elite athletes cannot be underestimated. In 2001–2, for example, ‘£22,550,608 was allocated from the World Class Performance³ programme to 33 UK/GB⁴ sports, representing a total of 762 athletes’ (UK Sport 2002c:7). The significance of Lottery monies is clear if we consider that, in the same year, UK Sport distributed (just) £5,817,768 of Treasury funding to UK/GB NGBs and other partner organisations to support, largely, their non-elite activities (UK Sport 2002c). Second, in 1995 the Conservative Government published Sport: Raising the Game (Department of National Heritage [DNH] 1995), the first government policy statement on sport in 20 years. The two key strands of Sport: Raising the Game—youth sport and excellence—were sustained in the Labour Party’s sport policy document, A Sporting Future for All (Department for Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS] 2000). A further instructive aspect of this document is the emphasis put on the modernisation of NGBs, to be achieved, in large part, by meeting objectives set at DCMS/UK Sport/Home Country Sport Council levels. Therefore, an important aspect of the discussion in Chapter 6 centres on assessing the significance of the changing pattern of resource dependency and the government prioritisation of elite success for policy at the elite levels of swimming, athletics and sailing.

In order to analyse the process of elite sport policy change in the three countries we draw on insights provided by a prominent meso-level theoretical approach—the advocacy coalition framework (ACF)—and provide an account of the emergence of sport policy in general and an explanation of the development of elite sport policy in particular, in Australia, Canada and the UK; an evaluation of the utility of the meso-level ACF in relation to its application to elite sport policy change; and an analysis of the process of policy change within the sport development policy subsystem.

Research methodology

Our research methodology draws on Marsh et al.’s (1999) identification of seven requirements necessary for a ‘satisfactory account’ of political and policy change over time. In this respect, a satisfactory account:

• should have a strong historical perspective, being theoretically informed but empirically grounded;
• needs a sophisticated, rather than a simplistic, conception of change;
• should recognise the importance of political, economic and ideological factors in any explanation of change, rather than exclusively emphasising one of them;
• must recognise that any explanation has to take account of the international as well as the domestic context within which change occurs;
• needs to be underpinned by a stated and developed epistemological position;
• must utilise a dialectical approach to structure and agency, rather than giving priority to either; and
• must acknowledge that the relationship between the material and the ideational is crucial and, again, dialectical.

(Marsh et al. 1999:1–2)

It is argued that by drawing upon the meso-level ACF the first four of these seven requirements can be addressed. The final three requirements identified above by Marsh et al. are addressed in the following sections of this chapter, and further consideration is given to the fourth requirement by way of using examples related to the notion of globalisation processes in order to illustrate key issues throughout the following discussion.

Although an in-depth discussion of ontology and epistemology would be inappropriate, it is important to note that this study is premised upon a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions closely associated with critical realism (cf. Archer et al. 1998; Bhaskar 1975). Drawing on this body of work, Sayer argues that ‘the explanation of social phenomena entails that we critically evaluate them …[and] their associated practices and the material structures which they produce and which in turn help to sustain those practices’ (1992:40). From this perspective, theory helps to identify and explain underlying structural relationships in policy networks, communities and advocacy coalitions, for example (Hay 1995, 2002; Marsh and Smith 2000, 2001). In short, this study is premised on what can be termed an ‘anti-foundationalist’ ontology (that is, not all social phenomena are directly observable, structures exist that cannot be observed empirically and those that can may not present the social/political world as it actually is) and an ‘inter-pretivist’ epistemology (Grix 2002:183). Using the phenomenon of globalisation as an example, and one that cannot be ignored in this comparative study, it is evident that there are both real processes going on, yet it is the discursive construction of these processes that, to some extent, shapes and mediates policy-making processes (Marsh et al. 1999). For example, with regard to our focus on elite sport, there has been an increase in the ease of global communication (e.g. knowledge-based epistemic communities involved in elite sport), the global role of the media and the increasing influence of multinational corporations (e.g. elite sport sponsorship).

These developments have political/policy consequences. For example, both state and non-state actors and electorates are now more aware of the policy problems faced, and the solutions adopted, by other countries. This is reflected in the increasing interest in issues surrounding policy transfer (cf. Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Evans and Davies 1999; Marsh and Stoker 1995). Clearly, there are significant arguments about the extent of such globalisation processes but there is little doubt of their existence (Marsh et al. 1999). At the same time, however, the ways in which globalisation processes impact upon national policy-making are mediated by its discursive construction. Questions are thus raised with respect to how state and non-state actors in the UK, for example, have discursively constructed knowledge gained from other countries, such as Australia, with regard to elite sport policy.

In order to understand better the nature of (elite) sport policy processes and policy change, the methodology adopted takes account of the three dialectical relationships highlighted by Marsh and Smith (2000). Drawing on Marsh and Smith’s work on policy networks, we can extend their analysis to policy subsystems. The three dialectical relationships are those between structure and agency; subsystem and context; and subsystem and outcome. In short, a theoretical framework that makes it possible to acknowledge both the influence of actors on the development of policies in subsystems and the impact of the structural context in which actors operate (cf. Goverde and van Tatenhove 2000). Our argument, then, is that this dialectical standpoint has significant implications for the interpretation of changes in elite sport.

First, the emphasis is on analysis that considers (policy) change over a considerable time period. As a dialectical approach calls for a longitudinal analysis partial snapshots of a brief period of time are rarely instructive. Thus, this study provides a review of sport policy developments over a period of 30 years, as well as a more detailed analysis of elite sport policy change over the past 10 to 15 years. In the UK, for example, such an approach requires an evaluation of ‘structural’ factors, such as the relatively enduring (political/policy) relationships embodied in government—civil society interaction, and those between the central government department for sport—currently the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)—and Sports Councils on the one hand, and actors/organisations within specific sport policy subsystems on the other. The analysis also takes account of ‘agency’ factors. An instructive example in this sense is the important catalytic role played by Prime Minister John Major in placing sporting issues higher on the political agenda in the early 1990s. Second, this view emphasises the need to adopt an analysis that takes account of the interaction between economic, political and ideological factors. It is argued that the ACF is particularly valuable in this respect because it emphasises the requirement of a long-term approach (usually over a decade or more) to the analysis of policy change and because it requires that analysis takes account of both exogenous factors—‘relatively stable parameters’ and ‘external (system) events’—and endogenous factors—the role of negotiating actors in policy subsystem coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1999:149).

Conceptualising power relations

The conceptualisation of power relations, in the initiation of policy, in influencing policy outcomes, and in setting policy agendas, for example, are central to an understanding of the policy process. It is important, therefore, to clarify how power is conceptualised in our analysis (cf. Hay 1995, 1997, 2002; Layder 1985; Lukes 1974, 1986). In adopting the epistemological and methodological assumptions outlined above, which incorporate a dialectical dimension, power is viewed as the capacity of agents as well as a relational and structural phenomenon (Goverde and van Tatenhove 2000). This formulation invokes the need for a relational conception of both structure and agency. As Hay argues, ‘one person’s agency is another person’s structure. Attributing agency is therefore attributing power (both causal and actual)’ (1995:191). Indeed, with regard to the analysis of policy networks and policy outcomes, Marsh and Smith observe that ‘By examining networks we are looking at the institutionalisation of power relations both within the network and within the broader socio-economic and political context’ (2000:6). Agency, as manifest here, is evident in a tight policy community, in Marsh and Rhodes’ (1992a) terms, or in an advocacy coalition (cf. Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1999). In an advocacy coalition, for example, actors share a set of fundamental beliefs (policy goals, plus causal and other perceptions), and aim to influence rules, budgets and governmental personnel in order to achieve these goals over time (Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier 1993b). In line with this position, Marsh and Smith (2000:6) draw attention to structural aspects of power in arguing that such ‘shared values and ideology will privilege certain policy outcomes’, thereby reflecting Lukes’ (1974) seminal argument regarding the ‘three dimensions of power’⁵, and the third dimension of power in particular.

Lukes’ analysis of the third dimension of power involves ‘the exercise of power to shape people’s preferences’ (Ham and Hill 1993:70) in order that a deeper account of the ways in which the socio-economic structure shapes the nature of people’s wants, expectations and overt interests might be explored. In this model, conscious policy decisions and expectations are only one aspect of the wider political phenomenon to be investigated and a more complete picture might be gained through an analysis of unconscious values, overt manipulation and covert preferences (McLennan 1990). Our view of power relations also has resonance with more recent work by Hay (1997, 2002), a key aspect of which is the argument that power can be conceived of as ‘contextshaping’ (Hay 2002:185). To define power in this way, Hay argues, is to emphasise power relations in which structures, organisations and institutions are shaped by actors such that the parameters of subsequent action are altered In short, this is ‘an indirect form of power in which power is mediated by, and instantiated in, structures’ (Hay 1997:51). Policy subsystems can thus be conceived of as involving ‘the institutionalisation of beliefs, values, cultures and particular forms of behaviour’ (Marsh and Smith 2000:6).

In sum, this conceptualisation of power relations moves beyond that inherent in conventional pluralist approaches; thus reinforcing the earlier argument for adopting the assumptions of a critical realist epistemology and a dialectical approach to the meso-level analysis of elite sport policy processes. At the meso-level of analysis, these observations are reinforced by Marsh and Smith, who argue that certain groups occupy privileged positions, which:

give them access to important policy networks [or subsystems] and membership of these networks is a key resource that gives them greater opportunities to affect outcomes. In order to understand or explain outcomes, we need to recognise and explain that structured privilege.

(Marsh and Smith 2001:537)

Identifying interests and the groups that coalesce around them; specifying the range of resources available to interest groups; and charting the strategies developed for their deployment are the central concerns of this study. In sum, it is argued that, in adopting the epistemological and methodological assumptions underlying critical realism, and i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Investigating Elite Sport Policy Processes and Policy Change
• 2 Theorising Sport Policy
• 3 Development of Sport Policy in Australia, Canada and The United Kingdom
• 4 Australia
• 5 Canada
• 6 United Kingdom
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• References