Creating and Managing a Sustainable Sporting Future: Issues, Pathways and Opportunities

Creating and Managing a Sustainable Sporting Future contributes to a critical understanding of the challenges key stakeholders across the globe encounter as they seek to manage periods of transition brought about by policy change relating to the provision of sport and physical activity.

The book uncovers the global challenges in terms of managing the re-orientation of stakeholder activities and organisational strategies, in response to the aspirations for a wider range of outcomes through sport-based interventions and establishment of partnerships with non-sport sectors. It illuminates the increasingly erratic trajectory of sport development service providers, as the environment within which sport organisations operate changes – through for example, climate change, demographic shifts, changing features of local economies and alterations to the structures of local government and governance – and the responses of sport organisations to these new realities differ greatly depending on location, institutional structures and leadership. The chapters highlight the changing social, economic, environmental and policy contexts within which sports organisations operate, and explain the subsequent need for new approaches to partnership working, physical activity re-scoping and integrated education programming.

Showing that the international mandate of creating active lifestyles and subsequent re-orientation of stakeholders towards physical activity cannot only contribute to re-defining sport but also in identifying novel ways for building and managing a sustainable sporting future, Creating and Managing a Sustainable Sporting Future is ideal for Sports scholars, and particularly those working on Sport Policy and Sustainable sport development. This book was originally published as a special issue of Managing Sport and Leisure.

Vassilios Ziakas studies cross-sectoral policy issues among sport, tourism, leisure, and events at the regional, national and international levels with an emphasis on strategic planning, community development and sustainability aimed at enabling optimal programme design, delivery and leveraging. He is the author of Event Portfolio Planning and Management (2014) and co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture and Tourism (2018).

Aaron Beacom has researched and published in the areas of sport in international development and disability / Paralympic sporting cultures. His editing experience includes co-editing Sport and International Development (with Roger Levermore, 2009 and 2012) and the Palgrave Handbook of Paralympic Studies (with Ian Brittain, 2017).