Call for Articles: Participatory Approaches in Sport for Development

We call on organizations, practitioners and researchers to share their experiences and insights on introducing participatory approaches (e.g. participatory action research, co-production, living labs) in their programs. Deadline November 15, 2023.

Sport for Development (SfD) as a field has grown and matured significantly. Thousands of organizations, NGOs and clubs now use sport-based approaches to support a variety of sustainable development goals.

As the field has grown, it has also become the subject of much criticism. For example, there were concerns about the fact that activities take place individually without being part of a larger program or strategy, that power structures are reproduced and that systemic factors are not taken into account. In turn, these weaknesses are believed to promote short-term and unfavorable outcomes that do not sustain change. Against this background, calls have been made for more holistic, structural approaches that address all levels of society while also involving organizational, institutional and political actors.

In response, a possible solution is to use participatory approaches to develop and implement SfD programs. In participatory approaches, implementers work with community members and stakeholders to identify problems, possible solutions, desired outcomes, and measurement methods. They respond flexibly to changes in approach based on the wishes of program participants and other stakeholders.

As part of the Erasmus+-funded Sport for Social Cohesion Lab (SSCL) project, we worked to support the implementation of a highly participatory Living Lab approach in five social cohesion sport programs in four different European countries. Insights, learnings and tools from the project will be shared on our project page and in an associated toolkit.

Send us your submissions

But our experiences and our particular approach are not the last word. We would like organizations, practitioners and researchers to share their experiences and insights on introducing participatory approaches (e.g. participatory action research, co-production, living labs) within their programs.

You can consider the following questions:

• What participatory approaches have you implemented in your programs?
• What were the benefits, challenges and opportunities associated with this approach?
• What do political and institutional actors need to do to better support holistic, more participatory approaches in SfD?
• What common factors and approaches can optimize the impact of such participatory approaches?
• What can the SfD sector as a whole do to promote the spread of participatory approaches?

The following questions are just suggestions to stimulate some ideas – feel free to write an article from any angle as long as the focus is on participatory approaches in SfD. We welcome submissions from a range of stakeholders across the Sportanddev community.

All contributions will be published on the sportanddev website and the contributors and their organizations will be named accordingly.

Submit your contributions to [email protected].

Items should:

• Be 500-1,000 words long
• Add a relevant landscape (horizontal) photo that you own the copyright to or is covered by a Creative Commons license. If you don’t have a picture we will try to source one
• Include a one- to two-sentence biography of the author(s).
• Add links to any Twitter or Facebook accounts you want to associate with the post
• Add links to any websites you want to associate with the post
• These are not advertising or press releases, but rather the sharing of findings for a broader field

sportanddev has published this call for articles as part of our participation in the Sport and Social Cohesion Lab (SSCL). Further information and tools about the project can be found here.

Project partners:

• Bochum, Germany: The German Sport University (which coordinates the project) and In Safe Hands
• Dublin, Ireland: Munster Technological University and Sport Against Racism Ireland (SARI)
• ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: International Sports Alliance (ISA)
• The Hague, Netherlands: The Hague University of Applied Sciences
• Olomouc, Czech Republic: INEX-SDA / Football for Rozvoj and Palacky University Olomouc

• Vienna, Austria: The European Network for Sports Education
• Copenhagen, Denmark: The International Platform for Sport and Development (sportanddev)

Image by Tim Kramer showing Living Lab activities in Bochum, Germany.