International Day of Sport for Development and Peace
Cities and municipalities around the globe have faced increasing tensions around migration and diversifying urban populations. These tensions have been further inflamed by political and media rhetoric that places migrants or newcomers as an illegitimate burden on already strained resources. Combined with the strain posed by increasing costs of living, climate change, and a seeming rolling array of global crises, this has placed communities under increasing stress and precarity.
The resulting tensions from these changes and challenges spilled into increasing conflict and division, leading to reduced trust in institutions, fragmented social groups and decreasing civic participation.
This has brought practitioners, scholars, and policymakers to search for solutions to repair these social fractures and bring increasingly divided groups together. Many have turned to social and community programming as a low-threshold way to generate social connections, reduce tensions and, ultimately, increase social cohesion. Sport, in particular, has played an increasing role as a potential site for social cohesion, and is recognised as potential developmental tool in countless policy documents, including from the United Nations, European Union and more.
Beyond popular claims about the so-called power of sport, there remain open questions about how and if sport can truly help achieve far reaching goals such as social cohesion. Conceptually, many initiatives aim to use of sport’s inherently interactive and social nature to bring often diverse groups together to develop social capital and foster intergroup contact. Others also understand sport as a site for experiential learning, using sport to deliver pedagogical activities aimed at supporting social awareness, skills, and values.
And, certainly, such initiatives have shown promising outcomes, including fostering social connections and working to counter prejudices.
Yet, behind the appealing logic of such initiatives, there remains an underlying structural weakness. These initiatives largely operate at the individual level, thus placing the responsibility for the long-term development of social relations and social cohesion on the very participants of the programmes. Though individual-level approaches undoubtedly have a role to play, these initiatives often obscure the role of structural and systemic factors in the social cohesion picture. Political or structural issues are seldom discussed within programmes, and the organisations delivering these programmes rarely engage in policy advocacy to improve these structural issues. In other words, the causes for divisions and marginalization are rarely addressed. As a result, participants are left carrying the burden of sustaining cohesive communities — and, when those efforts fall short, it is they, rather than the systems that produced the divisions, who are implicitly held responsible.
Scholars and practitioners have increasingly argued that sport-based initiatives must become more politically and structurally engaged to move beyond well-intentioned but limited interventions. This includes adopting critical pedagogical approaches that encourage participants to interrogate the structural roots of societal issues; shifting programme ownership toward the communities they serve; and engaging in policy advocacy to support structural changes.
Sport can bring people together on the pitch, but if we ignore what awaits them beyond the touchline, then social cohesion risks remaining out of play.
Louis Moustakas brings nearly a decade of experience at the intersection of sport and sustainability. He is currently a Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Kufstein and serves as Head of the Institute for Sport and Sustainable Development. His work focuses on research and teaching in sport policy, sport management, and sport for development. He is particularly interested in how sport can drive social outcomes such as social cohesion and employability, as well as in the systems that underpin the sport for development sector.