The power dynamics of sport for development and peace: governmental rationalities and microtechniques

Abstract

Sport and its use to achieve social aims in programmatic interventions has gained increasing attention over the last ten years. My original contribution to knowledge is to demonstrate that the dynamics of power in sport for development and peace (SDP) are driven by a quest to record social reality. Critical accounts in SDP have only partially explained the dynamics of power at work in the sector. I use the perspective of Foucauldian governmentality, combined with an interpretative and qualitative methodology, to interrogate collected data through critical discourse analysis (CDA). This demonstrates, in a novel departure, that discursive alignments between corporate social responsibility initiatives and SDP non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are the constituents of the connections between macro and micro levels in the economy of SDP. These connections that change practice have been termed elsewhere a “technology of governmentality” (Hayhurst, 2011). I uniquely demonstrate that alignments are rationally justified on what I have termed here, a logical basis, which is in turn founded upon the results of microtechniques of monitoring & evaluation (M&E) of programme interventions in SDP. In a further unique contribution to knowledge I show that this requires the reconstruction of the meanings of time and space during the M&E process, temporally and spatially limiting wide arrays of human experience.

Date of Award	Jan 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton