Sport for Development: A Social Movement Captured by Elites?

Over the last 30 years there has been a growth of actors involved in Sport for Development (SFD). Though some of these actors aligned with prevailing power structures, others challenged existing power structures. In that sense, the SFD movement became disparate and multi-faceted and could be seen as an emerging area that could challenge dominant structures. With time, the SFD sector has co-alesced around a variety of formal structures, and these more ‘rebellious’ tendencies have been dampened. Though some have argued that these structures show adaptation or professionalisation, using Olúfẹ́ mi O. Táíwò’s work as a foundation, I will argue that these changes emerged as part of a purposeful process of elite capture. In particular, elite capture has occurred in three interconnected ways. First, elite actors established standards, policies and guidelines that aligned with their interests. Second, elites imposed those standards by funding and controlling projects in the field. Finally, elites legitimised the standards they set by taking over avenues for knowledge production within SFD. Taken together, elite capture limits the ability of SFD actors to challenge the systemic factors that impede their participants and communities. To escape this, as Táíwò argues, means more than just offering rep - resentation to ‘marginalised’ groups. New structures outside of the constraints of existing ones are needed.

and become further formalised within what is now known as the field of sport for development (SFD).Numerous civil society and non-governmental actors have emerged in this sphere, and today thousands of organisations work to deliver sportbased social programmes within their communities (Svensson & Woods, 2017).Further underpinning this work, there is now a significant infrastructure of funders, educational offers, and media outlets that support the implementation, evaluation and dissemination of SFD activities (see, e.g., McSweeney et al., 2021;Ruck & Moustakas, 2023).
Along with this growth and formalisation, the sector has been subject to criticism about the lack of sustainable outcomes delivered by programmes and the potentially harmful reproduction of dominant power relations within its programmes (Coalter, 2010;Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011;Hartmann & Kwauk, 2011).For different scholars, the sector's inability to address these concerns is due to the too-broad ambitions ascribed to sport (Coalter, 2010), the tensions between the agendas of various SFD stakeholders (Raw et al., 2022), or the sector's inherent connection to broader global trends such as neoliberalism or neocolonialism (Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011;Hartmann & Kwauk, 2011;Henhawk, 2022).
The above arguments and analyses are all valid.The uncritical belief in sport as an inherent force for good has been detrimental to the sector's impact and SFD's inherent multisectoral nature has created numerous tensions, including as it relates to reconciling the agendas of implementers, funders and communities.However, in this essay, I want to extend these arguments further.I will argue that the limitations of SFD do not come (only) from the inherent structure, values or nature of the field, but have been provoked by a process of elite capture whereby elites work to co-opt and disarm SFD as a social movement that may pose a risk to their interests.This re-shaping may be occurring purposefully or be the result of the systems in which elites are embedded (Mills, 2000;Táíwò, 2022).Be it through conscious actions or blissful ignorance, however, I will argue that elites and associated organisations are not merely adapting to "evolving norms and scripts" (Peacock, 2011, p. 480) but instead shaping the broader SFD landscape in line with their interests.Using Olúfẹ ḿi O. Táíwò's (2022) work as a foundation, I will illustrate how elite forces worked to repurpose and defuse the SFD movement as a whole by engaging in a number of tactics connected to elite capture, and ultimately by setting, imposing and legitimising their own views and standards for the field.Supporting this line of argument, I rely on a mix of organisational documents, academic literature, as well as data and experiences from my own research.

Defining Elites and Elite Capture
Before progressing to a discussion of how elite capture has taken place within SFD, it is crucial to define the main terms underpinning this essay, namely elites and elite capture.The former, especially, is no easy task.Elite is an oft used and contested term within the broader sociological literature.To simplify this task, I will use the compromise definition proposed by Khan (2012) who, skirting Marxist and Weberian traditions, defines elites as those with disproportionate control over or access to a valuable resource, for example like social relationships or money.Elites, of course, often accrue this control or access due to their position and status within particular organisational structures.Thus, importantly for the present essay, elites should be understood as embedded in key positions within corporate, social, or governmental institutions.Elites and the institutions they represent are closely intertwined, and here both are used somewhat interchangeably.Individuals join the elite within the context of -and thanks to -particular institutional arrangements, and are often committed to upholding those very arrangements (Mills, 2000;Rahman Khan, 2012).In other words, elites, and the institutions in which they are located tend to mutually ensure that their power remains protected.These elites can be embedded across different types of institutions, including within the governmental and corporate sectors.As Mills (2000) argues, because of their shared origins, interests and mutual reliance, elites in these sectors typically act in way that help protect and consolidate their power as individuals, as a group and on behalf of their institutions.In the sport for development sector, examples of relevant elite institutions include not only states and corporations, but prominent organisations responsible for governing sport (e.g., international sport federations) or major funders in SFD.Of course, the reality is much more nuanced, as sport organisations, corporate sponsors and global SFD organisations are entangled in a complex web partnerships, financing, and implementation.
One process by which elites maintain and consolidate their power comes through what Olúfẹ ḿi Táíwò (2022) terms as elite capture.As a concept, elite capture has its roots in development studies where it typically refers to how elites capture the distribution of resources, project implementation and decision-making at the detriment of local communities or target populations (Musgrave & Wong, 2016).For his part, Táíwò extends this concept to describe how elites take over social movements or ideas that may go against their interests.Or, more succinctly, "elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many towards their narrower aims and interests" (O.Táíwò, 2023).Beyond defining what elite capture is, we must also consider how it happens.To that end, a number of strategies or tactics can be identified.These include repurposing terminology to align with elite interests, establishing decision sites that are farther removed from communities or democratic infrastructures, the imposition of increasingly technocratic processes, and the domination of elite interests within knowledge production (Musgrave & Wong, 2016;Táíwò, 2022Táíwò, , 2023;;Rahman Khan, 2012;Streeck, 2016).
In the following sections, I will detail how the SFD sector has been subject to these tactics, thus reducing the sector's potential to support systemic change.Before moving on, though, it is important to recognise that elite capture implies that SFD was not already in the hand of elites to begin with.As such, next, I want to briefly reflect on the history of SFD and its complex relationship with elites.

A Short Overview of SFD and Elites
In many ways, sport for development has always been intertwined with a certain elite.From the use of sport as a way to impose colonial values to the early presence of sport in development cooperation activities in the 1970s, what we now term as SFD has long been tied to elite interests (Bauer, 2022;Darnell et al., 2019).However, since the 1990s, many states withdrew from provision of social services and development activities, including within the SFD sector -for instance, in Germany (Bauer, 2022) -creating many important gaps within local and global social safety nets (Radcliffe, 2016).Responding to this, many civil society actors emerged to deliver key social services (Radcliffe, 2016) and, globally, the number of NGOs around the world the world has grown from approximately 16,000 in 1990 to over 25,000 in 2010 (Aldashev & Navarra, 2018).
In this period, SFD organisations likewise became increasingly numerous and prominent, and many were similarly born as a response to governments withdrawing from service provision (see, e.g., Darnell et al., 2019;Svensson & Woods, 2017).This growth in both civil society generally, and SFD specifically, created a significant, decentralised group of organisations explicitly working to achieve various social and systemic goals, such as improved education, social cohesion or peace (Radcliffe, 2016;Svensson & Woods, 2017).In doing so, some of these civil society actors may work with local governments or the private sector to support the delivery of goods and services (Lewis, 2010).However, they may also simply work around existing structures or actively promote systemic change (Lewis, 2010).This is certainly the case within SFD, where some organisations explicitly challenged current sporting or government structures and sometimes opted to eschew government support all together (Darnell et al., 2019).For instance, MYSA in Kenya was long-applauded for its active role in challenging local government and eschewing government funding (Darnell et al., 2019).In that sense, in its early days, the SFD movement was broad, disparate, and multi-faceted, and could be potentially understood as an emerging civil society vector that could work to build coalitions for change and challenge dominant power structures.Indeed, with the significant growth and decentralisation of SFD, the field became, as Bruce Kidd termed it, "a new social movement" (Kidd, 2008).
Over time, SFD organisations have coalesced in more-or-less 'institutionalised' or professionalised structures, including via thematic networks, academic networks, dedicated funders, and international policy making organs (Darnell et al., 2019;McSweeney et al., 2021).In particular, the early 2000s, with the founding of the United Nations of Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP) and the integration of institutional or corporate such as the IOC or Nike actors into UN SFD activities marked an important turning point for the field (cf.Brand, 2020;Darnell et al., 2019).However, as I will argue here, this institutionalisation or professionalisation was not merely a natural evolution or alignment of the field, but rather driven by various elites to capture the field and to set, reinforce, and legitimise standards that align with their interests.

Setting the Standards
A first mechanism which elites have used to capture the broader SFD field revolves around the different standards and policies structuring the field.This standard setting has allowed elites to define what constitutes good or 'high-quality' SFD while also delineating what SFD programmes or interventions should focus on.In turn, this allows elites to conflate their own narrower interests with those of the broader SFD movement and the communities they are meant to serve.
At an international level, this standard setting can be most prominently seen in the increasingly tangled relationship between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the United Nations.In the post-Cold War period, the IOC increasingly sought to formalise relationships with a variety of UN bodies (Peacock, 2011), giving the IOC an ever-more prominent position within the UN's sport-related activities.This position was further strengthened in 2017 with the closure of the United Nations Office of Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP), which was a department of the UN tasked with supporting advocacy and representation of SFD within the UN system (Bardocz-Bencsik & Doczi, 2019).Upon its closure, a statement was released outlining how: "the Secretary-General has agreed with the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, to establish a direct partnership between the UN and the International Olympic Committee.Accordingly, it was decided to close the UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace (UNOSDP)" (SportandDev.org,2017).
Through this, the IOC moved to fill a central position within a global network of SFD actors (cf.Richelieu & Webb, 2019), and became further involved in drafting policy documents and resolutions related to sport.In a 2022 resolution concerning SFD, the United Nations General Assembly further recognised the role of sport as an enabler of sustainable development and set standards regarding the measures states should take to enhance sport's potential contribution.Crucially for the IOC, this document extolls "the invaluable contribution of the Olympic and Paralympic movements" and offers its support for "the independence and autonomy of sport" (United Nations General Assembly, 2022).Thus, the IOC's presence at the UN and explicit inclusion within resolutions allows them to legitimise two favourable, but debatable, claims.Firstly, that the IOC and the Olympics are a force for good, and second that the autonomy of sport is a principle worthy of support.Autonomy, in particular, is a key political goal of sport federations, yet its legitimacy is increasingly questioned in policy, legal and academic circles.Though autonomy can be more narrowly understood as allowing federations to have control of sporting rules, academics have criticised sport federations for expanding the concept to total "freedom from government intervention" in order to become the "last vestiges of unaccountable power" (Freeburn, 2018, pp. 183-184).
On a smaller scale, numerous actors have likewise set standards for quality or exceptional work in the field that allows the interests of elites to appear aligned with the interests of the field and the communities they serve.One public manifestation of this is through the numerous awards that have emerged in the field, including from Beyond Sport, Peace and Sport, and Laureus.These awards nominally exist to acknowledge and reward "stakeholders demonstrating their commitment to benefit society through sport" (Peace and Sport, 2023).Functionally, they serve to present questionable actors or institutions as positive drivers of social change alongside locally focused, grassroots SFD initiatives.Peace and Sport, for one, offer a glamour-ous yearly venue in Monaco or, for the first time in 2023, in Saudi Arabia to confer awards on putatively deserving recipients while also establishing a false equivalency between the efforts of the celebrated NGOs with the undemocratic regimes of the hosts.Likewise, the Beyond Sport awards, which are funded through major North American sports leagues, place the work of local or regional SFD NGOs on the same footing as initiatives from these professional leagues.In this world, the National Hockey League, a historically white, exclusive, and conservative sport that relies on large arenas with artificially frozen ice (e.g.Fowler et al., 2023), gets recognized for its social values and climate initiatives alongside smaller, volunteer-driven activities from Nepal, Brazil or Haiti (Beyond Sport, 2018).Beyond merely establishing the quality or legitimacy of their own activities, these awards reinforce the standards desired by elites.These awards do not merely serve to demarcate 'high quality' SFD but work to marginalise or exclude organisations that may challenge elites.Within these awards, SFD programmes that are viewed as too far removed from the interests of these elites are simply not recognised.Advocating for democracy in Saudi Arabia, fighting capitalism and wealth concentration, or challenging the oft-exclusive nature of high-level organised sports are quite simply not part of the picture.

Enforcing the Standard
If the above-mentioned resolutions, awards, and quality criteria allow elites to set standards for the field, the financial resources of elites allow them to directly impose those standards on implementing SFD organisations.In other words, standard setting is reinforced by elites' ability to decide who gets funded and further control is exercised through the technocratic or bureaucratic processes associated with that funding.As such, elites can actively direct what kind of projects or programmes are delivered on the ground, and therefore ensure that they do not address the systemic or structural factors that may inhibit social justice or development but otherwise benefit elites.
Many of the aforementioned organisations have become active funders in the field of SFD.For example, as Peacock notes, the IOC has become a "financier of 'projects' and a bureaucracy of policies must be followed in order to secure funding" (p.494).Based on recent annual reports, global SFD NGOs such as Common Goal, Beyond Sport, Laureus, and Right to Play, likely direct upwards of 100 million USD in annual funding for projects or programmes (e.g.Common Goal, 2022; Laureus Sport for Good, 2022; Right to Play, 2023).These grants, however, often do not independently come from global SFD NGOs, but are rather financed through elite corporate and sporting institutions such as Mercedes-Benz, adidas, UEFA, FIFA, the National Football League, Fox Entertainment, and more (Beyond Sport, 2023;Common Goal, 2022, 2023).These corporate and organisational funders likewise also fund further organisations or initiate their own sport-based corporate social responsibility activities.In turn, this control over purse-strings places funders in a significant position of power.The sector as a whole is largely reliant on either short-term grants or, to a lesser extent, on corporate partnerships (Oaks Consultancy, 2021Consultancy, , 2023)), forcing implementers to constantly work to remain in the good graces of funders.Implementing organisations are kept in a state of precarity and subservience through a focus on short-term, conditional, project-based funding.In turn, the resulting project-based approach imposed on the field contributes to excessive donor influence, fragmentation, and limited impact (Lindsey, 2017).
The short and administration-intensive nature of these projects place significant constraints on SFD organisations and limits their ability to tackle systemic issues.Funders, be it global SFD NGOs, states or corporate sponsors, set and impose numerous conditions to their grants (Adams & Harris, 2014;Harris & Adams, 2016).Money can often only be used on specific, pre-approved budget categories and projects are tied to various performance indicators (Harris & Adams, 2016;Whitley et al., 2020).Combined with the already short-term nature of most funding, reporting requirements and indicators burden implementers with a need to demonstrate "success", ensuring that organisations are predominantly focused on short-term programme delivery and proving immediate, often individual outcomes as opposed to working on larger, systemic issues (Creamer, 2015;Whitley et al., 2020).These reporting requirements and precarious funding mechanisms place SFD organisations in what Dennison and Scott-Thomas (2010) term as "self-surveillance", and lead to docile, status quo abiding practitioners in the field (Harris & Adams, 2016).
On the ground, this translates to SFD projects that overwhelmingly focus on changing, or even "recalibrating", individuals' skills and behaviours as opposed to acknowledging or challenging systemic factors (Coalter, 2010;Hartmann & Kwauk, 2011;Moustakas, 2022).This, of course, is a logical consequence of a standard imposed on organisations that focuses on short-term projects with easily measurable, individual-focused outcomes.As Hartmann and Kwauk (2011) famously note, programmes often focus on socializing youth into a predetermined world, and the "perceptions of those who have benefited from social hierarchy and market-based competition are privileged as the standard to which others must emulate" (p.292).This generalized acceptance of a 'predetermined' status quo beneficial to elites is not just an abstract problem but is directly absorbed by programmes and participants.Right to Play, in its annual reports, vaunts how its programming gives young girls the 'life skills' to fend of harassment and abuse -merely accepting that abuse is a fait accompli and that life skills, not challenging social norms or structures, are the remedy (Right to Play, 2023).Most disheartening, perhaps, was one respondent who, as part of an evaluation from a different global SFD NGO's employability project, reflected that "It's upon me to change whatever situation I find myself in because at the end of the day it's me, myself, and I".Elite funded projects essentially take us through the looking glass to a world where major banks repeatedly fined for unethical practices support economic empowerment and global food corporations peddling junk food promote healthy lifestyles -and they do so by ensuring that the projects they fund obscure their role in the situation and instead focus uniquely on individual characteristics.The overarching effect of this is a shift of responsibility, as well as blame, for social change towards often already marginalised groups as opposed to fostering action or change amongst those in positions of power or privilege (Nixon, 2019).

Legitimising the Standard
Certainly, the short-term, project-based nature of these dominant, elite-led funding models are recognised as problematic by a large segment of scholars and practitioners, as readily evidenced by some of the citations used here.Yet, these critical voices are vanishingly few in comparison to the swaths of reports, articles and releases highlighting the success of elite supported SFD projects (e.g.Kang & Svensson, 2023).Annual reports from major SFD NGOs are littered with outputs and numbers showing their positive impact, with many of these numbers generated through external consultants and university researchers.Likewise, countless reports and academic papers extoll the impact and outcomes of these initiatives.This is the final tool used to capture SFD: reproducing the interests of elites within knowledge production processes.In doing so, elites can illustrate how their programmes 'work' despite potential criticisms, and further legitimise the standards that they set and impose on the field.In particular, this occurs in two distinct but related ways.
On the one hand, the aforementioned performance indicators imposed on projects often require implementers to engage academics and consultants to conduct evaluation work for the projects or programmes in question.This places the organisations and researchers in an awkward state of co-dependency.Further project funding is largely dependent on 'proving' the success of current projects, thus strongly nudging researchers to generate positive results for fear of otherwise harming the long-term financial viability of the studied programme or organisation.Meanwhile, researchers themselves are embedded in an increasingly precarious system where research is largely funded by third-parties and, academics in particular, are enmeshed in a culture of publish-or-perish that rewards a focus on metrics and outputs as opposed to social engagement or change (Smith, 2013).As such, generating positive results is in researchers' interests as well -after all, they cannot obtain research funds or evaluation contracts if negative results lead a programme or organisation to be shut down.Combined, the result of this is a swath of research and reports of often low methodological quality that nonetheless 'confirm' the success of elite-funded SFD projects (cf.Langer, 2015;Whitley et al., 2019).
On the other hand, elite actors in SFD also offer numerous research grantsincluding UEFA, FIFA, and the IOC -that are meant to support researchers pursuing sport and sport for development-related topics.Yet these research grants merely serve to reinforce the legitimacy and effectiveness of these organisations' developmental work at a broader level.Instead of focusing on specific programmes, these grants aim to support research that reinforces the overall values, approaches and systems supported by those organisations.For instance, UEFA's programme aims to "improves strategic decision-making in European football" (Union of European Football Associations [UEFA], 2023).Much like the awards or funding described above, research focusing on challenging or changing dominant systems are typically not funded.For instance, within the IOC's programme, research typically focus on favourable topics such as the sustainability of Olympic venues or the ability of the Olympics, or socalled Olympic values, to promote peace and development (International Olympic Committee [IOC], 2023).And, when research does uncover uncomfortable facts, the funders can use their control over funds and outputs to control publication.One col-league relayed to me how, in research funded by an international sport federation, they uncovered governance issues within their country's related national sport federation.Upon this discovery, they were instructed to not publish their results by the international sport federation funding the work.Another colleague recalled a series of research projects on women in sport funded by a corporate sponsor.In preparation for this work, the sponsor indicated that the research could not investigate or make any recommendation regarding gender-balanced boards, as this could embarrass the company who, on their own board, did not have an even gender split.
Though not always so explicit, the bottom line is that research in SFD is often structured by elites to reflect their interests and values, and the inherently precarious nature of funding for programmes, projects and research coerces those doing the research to acquiesce to elite interests.Be it from explicit directions given by elite research funders or the implicit standards associated with that research, this disables the kind of autonomy and critical perspective one would expect of research.In other words, this relationship of precarity and subservience places those doing research, be it implementers, consultants or academics, as a sort of professional managerial class for SFD, reproducing the will of funders (i.e.capital) to the detriment of communities (cf.Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich, 1977).

Escaping Capture?
In the above, I have made the argument that elites have captured the SFD movement by setting, imposing and legitimising standards beneficial to their own, narrower interests.Many of the critical shifts experienced by the field did not merely happen as a reaction to some vaguely defined environmental factors, but rather the field was pushed in certain directions on purpose.Now, this does not mean that I suspect that a cabal of global elites have worked in a highly coordinated fashion to capture the field.Rather, this means that elites have worked to impose their interests and values on the field, and that their interests are diametrically opposed to any conception of development that advocates for systemic, structural change.The status quo has been beneficial to these elites, and there is no material incentive for them to change that.
If one is to accept this general line of reasoning, then the logical next question is: what can be done about it?An oft proposed solution in SFD revolves around ideas of inclusion, participation, and co-creation.In other words, that local communities and marginalised groups should have a direct say in the design, delivery, and evaluation of SFD activities.Yet Táíwò himself is critical of this approach, as participation or representation of marginalised groups has become framed as a sort of panacea.In their substance, ideas of participation, representation and co-creation are often wellintentioned, productive ideas.Cumulatively, in practice they often merely confer the appearance of change, centring the perspectives of a privileged sub-set of otherwise underrepresented groups and reproducing existing power structures (Táíwò, 2020).Or, to use Táíwò's terminology, this politics of deference shifts the focus to who is in the room as opposed to the structure of the room itself.
From this, it follows that new structures -or rooms -outside of the constraints of existing ones are needed This implies moving from a politics of deference to a more constructive approach mainly concerned with "building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering" that concern themselves with "redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals" (Táíwò, 2020).For SFD, that means developing practices, funding and networks that actively seek to challenge and reshape social structures while moving away from reproduction of existing power relations through individual, life-skill focused programming.In many ways, the seeds of such an approach exist in what is variously termed structural or interventionist approaches (Hartmann & Kwauk, 2011;Sabbe et al., 2021), as well as within ideas of critical pedagogy (Meir, 2022) and indigenous worldviews (e.g.Hapeta et al., 2019;Henhawk, 2022).Cumulatively, what these critiques indicate is a need for SFD to adopt an inherently political stance concerning social structures, power relations and justice.Beyond merely fostering some vaguely defined set of skills, SFD should enable participants to understand and reshape the (political) world around them.That means working towards actual social and systemic change, not just incremental improvement.For instance, as Henhawk (2022) reminds us, goals concerning decolonization are not merely some metaphor for the improvement society but for the repatriation of land and renewal of Indigenous cultures A shift to such values would allow the field to truly capitalise on the potential presented by sport as an inherently social, interactive and relatively inexpensive activity that is widely beloved across the globe (cf.Cardenas, 2013).What is crucial here, however, is that we need not only to rethink how we deliver programmes on the ground, but how we build and structure the organisations delivering those programmes.We need to move away from focusing our attention to what activities are taking place in the room to the nature of the room itself.This, of course, is no easy task.I sincerely wish I could conclude this essay with a clear, generalisable path forward, a reflection on how to create new rooms for SFD organisations that allow them to escape from elite capture and work towards the institutional and systemic changes needed to deliver sustainable development.Yet such easy solutions are not at hand, and we need recognise that there are multiple ways of being and doing.Having said that, at least one thing is clear: building new rooms implies leaving old rooms behind (Táíwò, 2020).Or, for some, better still, there are rooms to be avoided altogether.Many longstanding SFD organisations started with more modest, activist roots only to be swallowed up by the standards set and imposed by elites.it is an illusion to think that we can take the money and resources of elites while remaining true to our initial agenda and values.One simply cannot build a new room while being caught in another one.And, make no mistake, from shiny awards to the perpetual carrot of short-term funding, to the labyrinthine reporting requirements, elite rooms are designed for just that: to capture.