Introducing Sport, Gender and Development: A Critical Intersection

Gender and Development: A Brief History

From the early 1970s to mid-1980s, “Women in Development” (WID) was positioned as various actions taken – vis-à-vis policy, programming, and other mechanisms – through which to include women in the development sector. This era was primarily focused on promoting women's economic contributions and income-generating activities (Sweetman, 2015). Here, Ester Boserup's infamous book, Woman's Role in Economic Development (1970), demonstrated how technological advances (e.g., the plow) contributed to the marginalization of women's labor, leaving them with low productivity and marginal status subsistence farming, opposing the view that modernization was beneficial for women. However, the limitations of this approach were clearly evident by the inability of WID to directly challenge patriarchy.

Hereafter, Women and Development (WAD) emerged, a slightly more radical approach which highlighted the challenges involved in integrating women into patriarchal institutions and practices, and centered more on women-only projects. However, the WAD approach failed to account for the productive and reproductive roles of WID (Marchand, 2009). Programs targeting women exclusively, particularly those that were economically driven, suddenly meant that WAD “became nearly synonymous with microcredit programs, which fit the pro-market approach and had the added advantage that, as studies showed, women spent more of the money they earned on children's nutrition, health, and education than men” (Jaquette, 2017, p. 246). Said differently, this era was marked by a consistent instrumentalist purview grounded by the “market logic” that equated economic activity with women's empowerment (Shepherd, 2016).

In the late 1980s, the field shifted again to focus more on gender and development (GAD) – whereby “women” was replaced with “gender” – in order to broaden and incorporate women of color and feminists based in the Global South, who felt that there were notable distinctions between the classifications of “woman” and “man” (Harcourt, 2018; Marchand, 2009). This move to “gender” was meant to result in an overall reframing of the field in terms of recognizing the social construction of gender and was critical in pushing the GAD field toward “intersectionality” in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

This period in development also included “gender and the environment” (GED) – supporting ecofeminist perspectives that essentially problematized presumed functionalist connections between women and nature embedded in the notion that “women were responsible for managing the environment” (Harcourt, 2018, p. 3). GAD and GED standpoints, when taken together, were both critical for diversifying the experiences of gendered identities incorporated into power relations. That is, such viewpoints embraced gender as one spoke of a larger “identity wheelhouse” to be considered along the wider helm of gender(ed) power relations. In many ways, GED helped to ensure GAD upheld more intersectional approaches that stress the importance of relations among various categories of difference – including race, class, ethnic differences and religion – and aim to locate how these categories overlap on both structural and relational levels. Still, and as Mason (2017) points out, the intersectional approach taken up by GAD approaches remained grounded in heteronormative perspectives, with transgender and queer bodies overlooked or excluded altogether.

Following the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, GAD frameworks promoted “gender mainstreaming” and urged multilateral agencies to move from WID to “gender equality” (Eyben, 2018, p. 519; United Nations, 1995). Gender mainstreaming involved “both a strategy for infusing mainstream policy agendas with a gender perspective and for transforming the institutions associated with these agendas” (Eyben, 2018, p. 519). And yet, a backlash emerged as gender mainstreaming became routinely automated, depoliticized and “bureaucratized” (Eyben, 2018, p. 519).

The failures of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the mid-1990s ushered in enthusiasm for more participatory, democratic and “good governance”-focused approaches to GAD. The push for international development targets (see Merry, 2016) – later taken up in the form of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – resulted in a focus on poverty reduction (2000s) leading to an agreement to provide debt relief to highly indebted poor countries. Honing in on poverty reduction resulted in gender equality objectives being overlooked. In 2005, the UN Foundation and Nike Foundation, in partnership with the NoVo Foundation, commenced the “Girl Effect” campaign – continued the focus on poverty alleviation, but began positioning girls as the “new panaceas” of development (Girl Effect, 2021). This emphasis on investing in the efficiency of girls and women as financially responsible was similarly taken up by the World Bank, framing gender equality as “smart economics” (Eyben, 2018, p. 521).

However, the Girl Effect and related campaigns have been heavily critiqued by feminist development scholars for a number of reasons. Of particular concern are the ways such campaigns often perpetuate a “feminization of responsibility and/or obligation” focused on the economization of girl-oriented initiatives (e.g., conditional cash transfer programs, microfinance activities, etc.) that end up validating naturalized and essentialist representations of girls (Chant, 2016; Roberts, 2015). The result is a “cocktail of celebratory girlafestos” (Koffman, Orgad, & Gill, 2015, p. 157) that tend to overlook the structural and historical causes of poverty and gender inequality by legitimizing, reproducing and even revering corporate-led neoliberal and global capitalist frameworks to lay claim to girls' empowerment and economic fortitude (Roberts, 2015). As Chant (2016, p. 26) remarks

Rationales for female involvement in conditional cash transfers, microfinance, and “Girl Effect”-type initiatives appear to be deeply rooted in a range of reactive gendered essentialisms, in which there seems to be insufficient political will to transform inegalitarian gendered responsibilities for livelihoods, to challenge male power and privilege, or to destabilize socially and geographically inequitable macroeconomic structures.

Critics also contend that conflating girls' empowerment with economic vitality simply frames women and girls as more efficient and responsible, thereby underlining their compliance with normative expectations (Cornwall, Correa, & Susie, 2008; Wilson, 2011). Other scholars have voiced the perilous techniques used by girl-focused development initiatives that all-too-often use the active bodies of racialized girls – for example, a Black girl using a shovel to dig a hole for a water well or a Brown girl bicycling to school (Khoja-Moolji, 2019). In turn, the economization of girls under this “new” approach to gender (equality) and development used “the bodies of black and brown girls” and made them “hyper-visible in humanitarian and international development discourses” (Khoja-Moolji, 2019, p. 3). As Wilson (2011, p. 322) asks, “what are the implications of the kinds of ‘positive’ images of women [and, we would add, girls] which are produced” and “in what ways are these images gendered and racialized?” Indeed, the Girl Effect campaign largely paralleled previous efforts by Nike to “set the tone for popular feminism's marshaling of injury and capacity as twinned discourses in an economy of visibility” (Banet-Weiser, 2018, p. 50) (also see Chapter 7).

The Girl Effect was just one strand of a broader response toward the various challenges faced by the international community – including the UN system – in promoting a “single recognized driver to direct UN activities on gender equality issues.” UN Women was subsequently established in 2010 – formally known as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women, 2021d). Alongside the UN, other international organizations such as Plan International also started to focus more exclusively on gender equality, specifically, through their seminal “Because I am a Girl” campaign, which ran from 2012 to 2018. In partnership with a number of organizations, Plan International, the UN and the Girl Effect launched a number of initiatives, such as “International Day of the Girl” in 2011 and turning various landmarks (e.g., the Pyramids in Egypt) pink to “raise public awareness of the importance of girls' education” in 2012 (Plan International, 2021).

Importantly, in 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emerged as part of the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” established during the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (or Rio+20) with gender equality and women's empowerment being essential to the achievement of each goal. The framework aims to “provid[e] a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future” with “17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership” (UN, 2021b). SDG Goal 5 “achieve gender equality and empower all girls and women” (UN, 2021a) is, of course, of particular relevance for the SGD realm. Some feminist development scholars suggest that the SDGs represented a new opportunity to reinvigorate the stagnating MDGs; with great concern that the MDGs were far too simplistic, measureable, reductionist and largely based on “the power of numbers to communicate a development agenda with a sense of scientific certitude and serious intent with potential for accountability” (Fukuda-Parr, 2016, p. 49). While the MDGs placed most of the onus on Global South countries with poverty-centric objectives; the SDGs have still been lauded for embodying “a truly We The Peoples Agenda,” with a sharpened focus on the operationalization and procedures for achieving development for all countries through social, economic and environmental tenets of development (Senit, 2020, p. 693). At the same time, the SDGs have also been denounced for lacking built-in accountability mechanisms to ensure they are realized (Fukuda-Parr, 2016).

Despite the “pros” and “cons” of the SDGs, they remain a mainstay on the SDP landscape. Over the last five years, a major focus of the SDP movement has been solidifying the link to the UN SDGs, resulting in the increasing institutionalization and professionalization of the SDP sector (McSweeney et al., forthcoming). For example, The International Platform on Sport and Development, The Commonwealth, and Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: “Sport for Sustainable Development: Designing Effective Policies and Programmes” set up to explore how sport can contribute to achieving the SDGs through specific procedures and approaches. Indeed, a key contribution of SDP to the SDGs is the focus on gender equality, an issue to which we further dissect in the next section.

The Rise of Sport, Gender, and Development

Of all the [Mathare Youth Sports Association's] initiatives, perhaps the inclusion of girls into soccer leagues has been the most interesting and courageous […] Given that sport has traditionally been seen as reinforcing patriarchy, the question is whether it [sport] can provide a unique opportunity to break down patriarchal structures, leading towards more equality.

(Willis, 2000, p. 845)

In 2000, Owen Willis wrote what was one of the first scholarly articles (to our knowledge) about one of the most established SDP NGOs – the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), in Nairobi, Kenya – and its programming for young women and girls. In the 20 years since this article was written, we estimate that thousands of SDP programs with an explicit focus on gender have emerged, many driven by large international NGOs such as “Women Win” – but some programming created by other smaller, more locally-focused entities too (e.g., Asociación Movimiento de Jóvenes de la Isla de Ometepe – AMOJO, in Nicaragua). Even still, many women and girls who participate in sport, leisure, recreation and physical activity on a day-to-day basis, outside the formalities of structured SGD programs, seem to be overlooked by accounts of SGD, at least in scholarly work.

Researchers have demonstrated that sport is a useful tool to contribute to GAD in various ways, particularly as a means to enhance girls' and women's health and well-being, facilitating their self-esteem and self-empowerment, fostering social inclusion and social integration, challenging and transforming gender norms, educating women and girls about HIV/AIDS prevention, and providing them with opportunities for leadership and achievement (Forde, 2009; Hayhurst, 2014b; Jeanes & Magee, 2013; Larkin, Razack, & Moola, 2007; Nicholls & Giles, 2007; Oxford & McLachlan, 2018; Saavedra, 2005; Thorpe & Rinehart, 2013; Willis, 2000; Zipp, 2017). Indeed, some of the early SGD research emerging in the late 1990s explored “unstructured” forms of SGD. For example, Jennifer Hargreaves examined the challenges facing the development of women's sports in South Africa, pointing to the multifaceted ways that the legacy of apartheid-shaped South African women's sporting experiences (Hargreaves, 1997). Martha Brady was perhaps one of the first scholars to draw attention to the SGD “field,” particularly through her work at the Population Council that considered how sport may be utilized to address gender inequalities and improve the lives of girls and women around the world (Brady, 2005; Brady & Banu-Khan, 2002). Brady's work focused on two mixed-sex programs in Kenya and Egypt, where she highlighted the importance of safe mobility and public spaces for young women to participate in SGD programming (Brady, 2005). Notably, the question guiding her research remains salient today: can sport “serve as a mechanism for building social networks and bringing girls into the public sphere, and by doing so begin to transform gender norms” (Brady, 2005, p. 36)? Here, Brady asserts that SGD may be located at the crux of two “types” of female activists realizing the possible potential of sport in different ways. First, she contends that development activists and feminist development theorists need to focus on sport as a tool to enhance international women's health and rights. Second, sportswomen and feminist sport theorists must “reach beyond their traditional scope to incorporate broader health and development objectives onto their agenda” (Brady, 2005, p. 35).

Brady (2005) and Willis (2000) define sport as a tool to contribute toward “development” using language from the United Nations Development Program. More specifically, Willis defines development as “enlarging people's choices” (2000, p. 840), and Brady frames development using the UN MDGs, arguing that sport is a pertinent tool to “promote education, development, health and peace” (2005, p. 37). Hargreaves discusses how development is often equated with “progress and liberation” where a “backward, usually agrarian, non-industrialized economy” is transformed into “an industrialized economy” (1997, p. 198). Today, the definition of development accesses varied understandings of “empowerment” and “progress” for girls and women.

What a number of early SGD-focused articles confer is that an effective sports structure may contribute toward social, economic, and cultural development objectives for women and girls (Brady, 2005; Pelak, 2005). Brady (2005) and Walseth and Fasting (2003) argue that the secular organization of sport may serve as a barrier to the social development of women and girls. Such studies emphasize the importance of religion, social order, different understandings of sexuality, and women's “lack of autonomy” (from a Western perspective), suggesting that women and girls may not experience the same development “benefits” through sport as those from other countries and cultures. The assumption that sport will “fix” and distract young women by discouraging them from participating in crime, gangs, or mingling with boys is put forth by both Willis (2000) and Brady (2005).

Burnett (2001) examines a program where sport is positioned as a tool to promote social inclusion for youth of low socioeconomic status. Here, she suggests sport is framed as a tool to promote participation and fun, not just “exclusivity and competition” (Burnett, 2001, p. 52). Burnett's (2001) findings also support the notion that sports development programs provide “important building blocks and the nurturing of sports talent” (p. 52). Similarly, Hargreaves notes that “a comprehensive sports structure is also an index of development” (1997, p. 198). Whereas gender-based SDP programs might target disadvantaged women and girls, high-performance sport programs tend to create training programs for promising young females who have been fortunate enough to have opportunities to get to that level (Brady, 2005; Burnett, 2001). In many ways, then, the programs for girls and women discussed in these articles often interweave program content to include both social and elite sport development goals. Regardless of whether earlier SGD scholars positioned sport as a tool to promote social development (e.g., Brady, 2005; Willis, 2000), high-performance sport development (e.g., Pelak, 2005), or both realms together (Burnett, 2001; Hargreaves, 1997), SGD programming to this day tends to rely heavily on the belief that the lives of women and girls in the Global South (and in marginalized communities in the Global North) will be somehow “enhanced” (i.e., improved health, self-esteem, inclusion, social mobility, integration, and empowerment) through access to sporting and physical activity opportunities.

However, and despite Hargreaves conducting research 20 years ago, it still seems that “women who c[ame] from minority groups and from countries outside the West have been marginalized, and their experiences, problems, struggles and achievements have been excluded from mainstream history and practice” (Hargreaves, 2000, p. 6). Sport feminists have increasingly moved toward exploring social inclusion and prioritizing the perspectives and needs of women from multiple ethnic and social backgrounds to build a unified front that aims to use sport to improve the opportunities for all women's participation (Hargreaves, 2000). Nevertheless, the focus on “sameness” and cohesion risks upholding essentialist claims that ignore the diverse experiences of gender and feminism across race, age, patriarchy and capitalism. Indeed, Pelak (2005) stresses the importance of actively avoiding universalizing women's sporting experiences by considering categories of difference as they influence sport and physical activity; and encourages those studying SGD to view culture as hybrid, fluid, and inherently dynamic. Put differently, she suggests we must be mindful of how “gender intersects with other systems of power, namely race and class” (Pelak, 2005, p. 55), while also being attentive to ways in which scholarship on women's sporting experiences has long focused on the White, middle-class, Western woman (Hargreaves, 2004). As Shehu (2010, p. x) attests:

Despite the pressures created by feminists and other social movements to open up the sport arena to women and other previously excluded groups, the age-old patriarchal principles embedded in sport, reinforced at every turn by the mass media and gendered socialization, remain a major obstacle to personal fulfillment and advance in sport for many African women….[African] women, perceived as a threat to the male system of power relations in sport, become targets of toxic myths, stigmas, and harassment in sport spaces to perpetuate the domination of these spaces by heterosexual, masculine males.

Over the past decade, feminist sport scholars have drawn from different strands of critical race and feminist theory – i.e., transnational feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, intersectional feminisms – to reveal the politics of race, ethnicity, culture and religion in women's experiences of sport and physical culture both in organized sport and everyday forms of physical activity, fitness and recreation (e.g., Azzarito, 2019; McGuire-Adams, 2020; Palmer, 2016; Ratna, 2018; see Ratna & Samie, 2018 for an excellent overview). Such important writings on difference as it is lived, felt, resisted and negotiated, combined with Shehu's (2010) warnings, hold important implications for considering the contradictions of SGD: its apparent utility as a tool for empowering and challenging gender norms for women and girls; and yet, its simultaneous ability – in some contexts – to act as a catalyst for women and girls' subordination and various forms of sexual violence and gender-based discrimination.

Notably, most studies that examine the intersections among SGD allude to a lack of resources and poverty as one of the most prominent barriers experienced by women and girls in terms of sport participation (Brady, 2005; Burnett, 2001, 2018; Hargreaves, 1997; Pelak, 2005). In fact, Hargreaves (1997) argues that the “feminization of poverty” has resulted in dire situations for many African women, as the “lack of adequate housing, safe water, sanitation, and basic health care – the main causes of preventable disease – are almost exclusive to the African population and mainly to women” (p. 198). Others refer to the lack of parental involvement and financial support in young girls' activities, mostly due to the challenging structural inequalities they must navigate – as well as a lack of sports facilities, equipment, and human resources (Brady, 2005; Burnett, 2001; Shehu, 2010). Moreover, gender inequalities, “gendered spaces”, lack of women sports figures as role models and patriarchal sport systems are other important factors that prevent women and girls from participating in physical activity (e.g., Brady, 2005; Meier & Saavedra, 2009; Nicholls, Giles, & Sethna, 2011; Walseth & Fasting, 2003). Finally, studies featured in the edited volume on Gender, Sport and Development in Africa by Jimoh Shehu (2010) explore how young women are often dissuaded from participating in sports such as soccer due to its association with cultural, religious and patriarchal norms; as well as concerns pertaining to its physicality and vigorous nature, which are thought to negatively impact young women's fertility, wellbeing, and sexuality. For example, Daimon (2010, p. 10) explains how soccer in Zimbabwe risks exposing women and girls who participate to various forms of violence through “hooliganism, sexual molestation; discrimination, lack of sponsorship, juju stigmatizations, and gender socialization problems within the home.” Taken together, these studies hold important implications for considering the tensions, challenges and contradictions of SGD. That is, although some SGD interventions may contribute to reducing gender divides, at the same time, the everyday interactions and decision-making of program participants that may present resistance to gender stereotypes and norms may often be constrained due to broader structures of gender inequality (Chawansky, 2011; Collison, Darnell, Giulianotti, & Howe, 2017; Thorpe, 2016).

While these are important insights into SGD programs, Saavedra (2005, p. 1) calls for more research to “sensitize us to the gendered implications of any and all work related to sport and development, not just to that focused on females” (p. 1, italics added for emphasis). She also cautions those attempting to involve women and girls in SGD projects to be concerned with safety (particularly sexual violence in sport), competing obligations (e.g., sexual division of labor creates heavy demands on women and girls' time for leisure) and finally, gender and sexuality norms (Saavedra, 2005). Such arguments correspond with recent efforts by Oxford and Spaaij (2019, p. 4) to “end the static Western gender binaries that trap non-Western women in a double bind of being represented as either empowered in the Western sense (e.g., ‘modern, neoliberal, capitalist’) or ‘the perpetual victim’ needing to be rescued.” Indeed, it seems that if programmers overlook such issues, they risk perpetuating an integrative, gender-in-development approach (e.g., integrating women and girls into existing male-dominated structures), rather than a transformative GAD approach (e.g., fundamental and transformative change to existing dominant systems and structures of gender (in)equality) (Zipp & Nauright, 2018).

Scholars have also critiqued SGD programs along similar lines for the ways such initiatives, at times, simply absorb young women into existing gender structures (Burnett, 2018; Chawansky, 2011) often placing responsibility on “beneficiaries” of SDP (i.e., girls and women) to alter complex gender structures and relations (Hayhurst, 2016). Alternatively, other studies suggest that – while taking place within highly institutionalized gender inequality – women in SGD programs (in this case, Papua New Guinea) may use consciousness-raising activities about, for example, structures of oppression in their lives that may offer “potentially transformative processes that provide a foundation for change” (Seal & Sherry, 2018, p. 255). Such work argues that there are thus opportunities for young women to change through sport-focused development interventions at the microlevel (Seal & Sherry, 2018). A number of studies investigate how gender norms may be contested by young women's actions through and in sport in contexts where heteronormative ideologies remain about female sport participation, suggesting that those who participate in SGD have opportunities to resist and challenge hegemonic, often neoliberal ideologies and commonly patriarchal social norms (Hayhurst, 2014; Nicholls, Giles, & Sethna, 2011). Indeed, debates pertaining to the ways young women and girls are thought to be purveyors of social transformation and change vis-à-vis SGD connects well with the Girl Effect campaign: an initiative in the broader field of development that has played a key role in critically examining SGD research. In the section that follows, we turn to the Girl Effect in more depth to consider its role in SGD.

Sport, Gender and Development: A Critical Feminist Intervention

As detailed above, the use of sport as a tool to purportedly improve, empower and/or enhance the lives of women and girls is not a new phenomenon. Its history is vast, complex and well-documented (see Caudwell, Mansfield, Watson, & Wheaton, 2018; Cooky & Messner, 2018; Hargreaves, 1997, 2004; Sherry & Rowe, 2020; Toffoletti et al., 2018; Vertinsky & Hargreaves, 2006). Indeed, scholarship on sport, physical culture, activity, leisure, and recreation has examined the relationship between sport and gender from a wide range of perspectives, including conservative, liberal, Marxist, radical, cultural studies, postmodern, intersectional feminism (to name but a few) (Mansfield, Caudwell, Wheaton, & Watson, 2018). Our book is not meant to serve as an exhaustive overview of the relationship between sport and gender. Rather, our aim is to focus on various theoretical and conceptual tenets used for exploring SGD – including (but not limited to) – an exploration of sport feminisms, neoliberal feminisms (as deployed vis-à-vis GAD that emphasize discourses of empowerment, self-confidence, body positivity, individualism), as well as feminist materialist, feminist physical cultural, postcolonial, anticolonial and decolonial feminist lenses.

In this book, we also critically examine the relationship between SGD and the United Nations in an effort to pinpoint how SGD has been “mainstreamed” by dominant development actors as imperative for promoting sexual and reproductive health rights – and, in the #MeToo era – as a programming model to prevent gender-based, domestic and sexual violence against women and girls. Clearly, and in the (post) COVID-19 pandemic moment, there has already been evidence of the adverse ways SGD – and the women's sport and physical activity sector more broadly – has been particularly impacted and threatened on local, national and global scales (IWG, 2020; UN, 2020).

In subsequent chapters, we build on research conducted by each of us using a range of methods (i.e., fieldwork, digital methods, media analysis) in multiple contexts/sites, to examine how popular feminism, nonprofit and commercial campaigns related to SGD are (re)produced, circulated and resisted through everyday practice, organizational policy and media representations. We inform and ground this empirical work in a variety of countries and contexts – including with organizations and individuals in Afghanistan, Uganda, Nicaragua, South Africa and India. While the findings from these particular locations cannot be generalized more broadly, we hope the overall arguments we make throughout this book and illustrated in particular chapters and contexts can be taken up to expand feminist thinking, research and interventions in the field of SGD.

As feminist scholars, however, we would be remiss not to highlight the challenges and importance of grounding this book with our “reflexive sense[s] of humility” (Kidd, 2011, p. 609). We identify as three white women hailing from postsecondary institutions in three countries from the Global North: Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States. Despite our apparent “similarities” (gender, whiteness, privilege), our gendered bodies are read, lived and experienced differently in each of these contexts, as we each navigate and respond to different histories of settler colonialism and our individual and collective responsibilities within ongoing systems of inequality and injustice. Put slightly differently, “we sit with different settler accountabilities and responsibilities in different lands” (Yazbeck, Brown, Danis, & Nelson, 2019, p. 76). Importantly, our differences (nationality, sexuality, age), as well as our similarities, shape our access within and across the varied spaces and places of SGD, SDP and development work more broadly and thus also our accountabilities and responsibilities to the communities with whom we work.

Collectively, as scholars, practitioners and/or participants, we have been involved in a number of sport and gender-focused nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), programs, projects, interventions, policy-making opportunities and other “SGD venues” throughout the last 20 years. Throughout this period, we have witnessed the ebbs and flows of sport and its relationship to gender and development. Despite our active participation in a variety of roles in the SGD phenomenon, we do not claim to be “the” experts. On the contrary, we write this book with the aim of opening a critical dialogue that values the multiplicities of knowledge and experience within and across SGD. In this book, we reflect on our own feminist research journeys in SGD while also “searching for new ways to develop better collaborative research relationships across diverse communities, all with the aim of producing knowledge that will contribute in some way to creating a more just society,” (Frisby & Creese, 2011, p. 1). It seems crucial, then – given the focus of this book – to uphold Nagar's (2014, p. 100) call for a reworking of typical academic reflexivity; a brand of reflexivity that seems to invoke apolitically rehearsing an individual researcher's social identities in relation to the institutional locations in which they operate. Instead, Nagar calls for a kind of reflexivity that “could become a basis for forming situated solidarities with third-world subjects to produce potential[ly] (more) meaningful knowledges across geographical, institutional, and sociopolitical borders” (2014, p. 100). As we further explore throughout this book, especially in our coauthored chapters with grassroots SGD activists and long-term research collaborators from India and Nicaragua (see Chapters 3 and 6), it seems increasingly pressing to decenter the production of knowledge in SGD (and SDP, more broadly). Though we further expand on these key debates in Chapters 2 and 8, here, we acknowledge the clear limitations and privileges of our positions as settler scholars in the Global North with common and distinct interests. Thus, in various places throughout the book, we have tried to clarify the instances when our contentions only refer to one of us in an effort to ensure we do claim to speak on behalf of authorship team members.

Unpacking Key Concepts: Reflections on Terminology

This book is intended to be accessible to a wide range of readers, including academic researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and undergraduate and graduate students. We have the privilege of making this book open access, therefore increasing its availability, reach, and thus hopefully its accessibility as well. In doing so, we hope to stimulate much needed conversations among a broader range of communities and stakeholders in SGD and SDP beyond the ivory tower. However, the field of SDP is often punctuated by key terms that, we suggest, require more nuance and debate to help open the conversation. Below, we outline a few of the concepts we critically engage with throughout the book; terms that we suggest deserve greater clarity in terms of how they are deployed, understood and taken up in SGD/SDP. For example, we hope to point out the dangers in assuming some concepts are universal, static and binary and urge readers to contemplate their definitions in multiple ways. For, as Merry (2016) points out, there is great power in the vernacular, especially through local/global development interventions. Vernacular understandings of SGD, agency, empowerment, feminism, equality, and reciprocity, as Merry (2016, p. 215) writes, “need to be translated into global categories that will travel across lines of culture, class and religion.” The vernacular in SGD seems all the more pressing because “these categories need to be translated into local terms in order to measure local ideas and behaviors accurately, but they need to retain their universal meanings in order to make comparisons possible across borders” (Merry, 2016, p. 215). We would be irresponsible, then, not to likewise question what these terms truly mean for the variety of people and communities involved in our research, in diverse sites and contexts. We do our best to better understand the key limitations, tensions, and (un)intended consequences of employing these terms without questioning their meaning(s) in a variety of locales. Below, we briefly note just a few examples of some of the central concepts and categories we have been wrestling with in the writing of this book.

Theoretical Underpinnings and Engagements: Feminist Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory

Feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith once wrote that “theory is a tool to think with” (cited in Frisby, Maguire, & Reid, 2009, p. 16). Feminist theories, in particular, have been essential for igniting new questions, resisting and countering dominant theories pertaining to social relations, “unlearning” privileges (Spivak, 1990), unveiling complex power dynamics and helping people probe, view and “critique the otherwise invisible and taken-for-granted” (Frisby et al., 2009, p. 16). But feminist approaches are of course partial, contested, and also muddied in coloniality.

Feminist theory has shifted and mutated over the last 50 years, challenged by and responding to activism and academic debate, particularly in reaction to those who were marginalized by the complicity and dominance of privileged feminists. A shift to intersectionality subsequently opened up feminist theory to decolonality, postcoloniality, queer theory, trans theory, women of color feminism, critical disability studies and ecofeminist theory and other environmental, posthuman, and material feminisms that explore the nonhuman (Collins, 2019). And yet, some feminist theories, caution Purewal and Loh (2021, p. 1), have been “implicit and complicit with the modern episteme of coloniality by envisaging a feminism that can operate within the coloniality of power rather than viewing the dismantling of its tools and edifice as a necessary step for epistemic change.” It stands to reason that feminist theories and practices are inculcated in the exclusion of, for example, Indigenous knowledges, gender and sexual minorities, people of color, and working classes (Persard, 2021, p. 14). Our book is framed by, and grounded in, a variety of feminist theories that help put our work in active conversation with other SDP scholars. In doing so, we are not suggesting these are the only useful orientations to explore the myriad of issues encompassed in SGD. However, across the chapters, we mostly engage with and take up feminist theoretical approaches, including: poststructuralism, postcoloniality, decolonialism, political ecology, neoliberal feminisms and new materialisms. Below, we briefly outline the key overlapping features and distinctions between postcolonial and decolonial feminist thought, two key theories that are perhaps the most prominently featured throughout the book.

Postcolonial orientations aim to draw attention to the harmful legacies of colonialism that have been replicated through the directives and destruction of global neoliberalism and nationalism. And yet, it is important to actively contest the idea that “‘post'colonial’ as ‘past'colonial’” and instead, realize coloniality as the colonial past and present (Purewal & Loh, 2021, p. 1). Postcolonial theory is driven by attending to difference, striving to dismantle essentialist understandings of “cultural diversity” and subvert the dominant discourses of imperial Europe (Narayan, 2000).

Postcolonial feminist theory centers on the multiple ways that gender, race and nation interlock to create oppressive conditions that are so often amplified by dominant discourses of representation, development, and power relations; they may be resisted through “counter-narratives” (Geeta & Nair, 2002). In short, a postcolonial feminist lens is useful for unveiling how power is embedded in, and facilitated through, history, place, and political–economic relations (McEwan, 2009). But postcolonial feminist theory has been critiqued for being overly grounded in the abstract – in textual analysis, imagery and discourse; a theory for elites that is overly embedded in abstract postmodern analyses (Collins, 2019; McEwan, 2009). Others counter that postcolonial feminist theory was always a project of decolonization that aimed to represent marginalized people ethically (Collins, 2019). Issues of ethical representation lie at the center of Spivak's (1988) notable critique pertaining to the dangers that the postcolonial critic may encounter in continuing to thrust a “dark vision” of “Otherness,” which she argues detracts from the ability of the “subaltern to speak,” as they are denied full political representation. As Collins (2019) writes, “the challenge for postcolonial theory lies in seeing how its critical theorizing does and might conform to decolonial resistant projects” (p. 109).

In fact, a number of intellectuals and activists have started to move away from postcolonial feminist approaches: instead, decolonial, decoloniality and decolonizing seem to be more favorable (Rodriguez Castro, 2021; Persard, 2021; Purewal & Loh, 2021). The tension between postcolonial and decolonial feminist theory is palpable and worth drawing attention to, for we engage with both lenses throughout this book. While we do not have the space to properly dissect the underpinning difficulties, ongoing conversations and debates in using both approaches, it is important that we signpost some key issues.

In short, a central contention put forth by the decolonial feminists project is that it goes beyond simply studying postcoloniality. Indeed, when post(-)colonial theory is written with a hyphen – the concern is that it represents a period after colonialism: post means “past,” therefore suggesting that colonialism and its effects have been “definitively terminated” (Hall, 1996, p. 243). This is one of the key critiques of decolonial feminists: that, though “decolonization” may have taken place in many Global South nations (for example), those regions are still mired in, and devastated by, the impacts of colonialism and neocolonialism. Decolonization thus more explicitly calls for political action – for not simply criticizing colonial relations but for actively dismantling them (Collins, 2019). Decolonial and postcolonial feminist approaches have also been distinguished spatially (though such static geopolitical pigeonholing may be contested): whereas decolonial feminism has long been associated with Indigenous scholars; postcolonial feminist scholars are more often located in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East (Collins, 2019). If purposefully connected to materiality, questions of global inequality, power relations and control over resources (for example), postcolonial feminist approaches hold the potential to contribute to resistance goals of decolonization. Decolonial feminist approaches prioritize anticolonial thinking and foreground resistance. Linda Tuhwai Smith's call for decolonizing methodologies, for example, presents techniques and opportunities to disrupt, dismantle and deconstruct traditional ways of knowing; and instead, to privilege “indigenous knowledges, voices, and experiences” (Smith, 2005, p. 87).

A number of SDP scholars have taken up the postcolonial theory mantle (Saavedra, 2018), including postcolonial approaches for analyzing and untangling the relations in which SDP takes place within and through (Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011), for studying specific programming (Johnson & Whitley, 2016; Mwaanga & Banda, 2014) and for interrogating the self in SDP (McSweeney, 2019). An approach informed by decolonizing frameworks and praxis, as evidenced by Oxford (2019) and Oxford and Spaaij (2019), offers research on SGD in Columbia. It shows how decolonial theory is especially helpful for explicitly questioning how neocolonialism and postcolonialism underlie SGD programs that, in many instances, tend to reinforce and even perpetuate the role of girls and women in sport and the dominant masculine structures still embedded in the broader structural context of SGD programming. Hayhurst's research on SGD has tried to use postcolonial feminist participatory action research to purposefully connect to materiality, questions of global inequality, power relations and control over resources (for example) to contribute to the resistance goals of decolonization (Hayhurst, 2016, 2017).

Despite these contributions, we suggest the time is ripe to forge new pathways of thought that depart from coloniality in the academy and the overall structures of extant knowledge on SDP/SGD, in an effort to locate “an epistemic reconstitution for feminist thought and yields new methods for consideration” (Purewal & Loh, 2021, p. 7). We thus acknowledge the possibilities, pitfalls and tensions in engaging both postcolonial and decolonial feminist lenses. Though postcolonial feminist theory may arguably lack the much needed sparks of resistance that knowledge projects fueled by decolonization may ignite and perhaps the term “postcolonialism” has “lost its critical edge” (Collins, 2019, p. 114), we suggest it still has traction for generating critical thinking about gender, race, nation, sexuality, class, social inequalities and social justice in and through SGD and beyond. This is especially true as we engage with both lenses (and many more offered throughout this book) as feminist scholars who embrace humility, respect, generosity and a continued commitment to learning with and from our communities of practice (Mokhtar, 2021). However, and in taking a cue from Persard (2021, p. 25), we urge SGD scholars to avoid “deploying the language of decoloniality uncritically.” Instead, and as Persard submits:

We proceed with these tensions with a commitment to pedagogy and praxis that seeks to problematise traditionally oppressive structures of knowledge production and endeavour to create new knowledge formations and pedagogical practices, even as coloniality and its remnants saturate and structure our feminist realities.

(Persard, 2021, p. 25)

For those working in the field of SDP and SGD, such commitments can and should guide our research, teaching, supervision and mentoring, activism, allyship and advocacy.

Overview of the Book

We offer this book as an initial attempt to provide a timely update to a scholarly area that has developed and diversified significantly since the early years of the millennium and has experienced particularly rapid growth in the five years since the last significant studies that initially described the “SGD field” (e.g., Brady, 2005; Saavedra, 2009). Despite the many efforts to better account for the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which SGD takes place and the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality that influence broader SDP programs and research, our hope is that this book offers further empirical, conceptual, and theoretical developments in the area of SGD (Chawansky, 2011; Hayhurst, 2011; Toffoletti et al., 2018). In the chapters that follow, we try to respond to, and advance, academic discourse in the SDP field, by addressing recent queries posed by feminist sport scholars to better understand how gender inequalities may be transformed and ruptured by an approach that does not simply place responsibility on women and girls. We also provide an explicit focus on fully contextualizing SGD in relation to current and emerging issues in international development.

In Chapter 2, we focus on methodologies in SGD, honing in on researcher and practitioner embodiment, reflexivity, ethics and research relationships. With its focus on research in five different countries, we strive to bring together a multitude of contexts and viewpoints of three scholars attempting to “do” feminist SGD research into a productive conversation. By drawing connections and comparisons across these diverging contexts and our own lived experiences, we discern critically reflexive accounts of what is transpiring in the SGD field transnationally, while remaining sensitive to the importance of community context and local iterations of SGD.

In Chapter 3, we critically examine notions of economic empowerment by considering how commercialized feminism and urbanization come to matter for AGYW in one SGD initiative based in Delhi, India. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the complexities of economic empowerment messages in SGD by exploring how AGYW in the Goal-Delhi program understood and made sense of economic progress and possibilities in their own lives. The Goal-Delhi program is unique when compared to other SGD projects in that it combines the sport of netball with life skills modules on health and hygiene, communication skills, and financial literacy. This chapter ultimately highlights the changes related to AGYW's understanding of their futures and the challenges they experienced and anticipated as “empowered” young women in Delhi.

In Chapter 4, we discuss the rise in Action Sports for Development and Peace (ASDP) programs targeted at girls and women within the context of the “Girl Effect.” We begin by describing the rise in ASDP programs, considering the potential of noncompetitive, informal sports (e.g., skateboarding, surfing, climbing) for GAD. Following this, we critically discuss some of the dominant discourses in the justifications and narratives of many such initiatives. In the main part of this chapter, we then offer the case of Sport for Youth* (pseudonym) to highlight the efforts employed by this action sport-focused organization to provide girls and young women in Afghanistan with opportunities to participate in sport and education. We then consider the struggles and strategies being employed by local and international staff of the two Afghan facilities in their everyday efforts to support young Afghan girls and women into and through their programs. In prioritizing the lived experiences of those passionate and devoted local and international staff involved in the “doing” of SGD work, this chapter offers insight into how deeply the staff value the opportunities in action sports and associated programs for improving the lives of girls and young women and the risks, reflections, compromises and contradictions they are willing to navigate in continuing this work.

In Chapter 5, we explore the value of feminist theories of space and embodiment for examining the gendered experiences of women working in the field. Drawing upon interviews with eight international women who have spent extended periods of time working for a sport and education NGO in Afghanistan, this chapter reveals the various ways these women experienced and managed their Western female bodies within and across work and nonwork related public spaces. In so doing, this chapter builds upon and extends current literature in SDP by bringing feminist theories of space, culture and embodiment into conversation with empirical material relating to Western women's experiences of working and living in high-risk development contexts. By focusing on the gendered embodied, lived experiences of international women staff within and across organizational and public spaces, valuable insights can be obtained into “the operation of gender within the everyday praxis and experience” (Partis-Jennings, 2019, p. 180) of SDP and SGD work.

In Chapter 6, we draw on postcolonial feminist political ecology theory to unpack the connections between GBV and the environment in SGD programming in Nicaragua. To do this, we discuss the utility of postcolonial and decolonial feminist political ecology approaches – combined with feminist participatory action research – to better understand, and prioritize, young Nicaraguan women's experiences of the environment and GBV as they participated in an SGD program used to promote environmentalism and improve their sexual and reproductive health rights. Throughout the chapter, we make four key arguments: first, complex racialized, gendered and economic relations intertwine to impel both human and nonhuman elements in shaping SGD programming in unintended ways. Second, gendered hierarchies, roles and relations take place and are exacerbated through SGD, especially through the pursuit of neoliberal and colonial development under the semblance of “sustainability”. Third, the prevention of violence to the physical environment is deeply entangled with the prevention of violence against women's bodies. Fourth, the young women participating in SGD interventions are all-too-often “tapped on the shoulder” to do the curative labor, while those who are mostly responsible for environmental damages and violence (such as the government, corporations, etc.) are failing to prevent such destruction from taking place to begin with. We conclude our chapter by suggesting that we must critically account for the broader physical environment, racialized power, new imaginings and formulations embedded in colonial past–presents as human and nonhuman forces continue to shape the experiences of SGD interventions.

In Chapter 7, we explore the ethics of representing girls and women from the Global South in SDP organizational communication campaigns. First, we detail recent shifts in humanitarian communication strategies, with a particular focus on representations of girls and young women from the Global South. Herein we draw upon humanitarian communication and postfeminist literature to explore the political and ethical considerations involved in representing girls and women from the developing world in SDP campaigns. In the latter part of this chapter, we focus on Sport for Youth's∗ social media representations of girls and young women doing action sports in Afghanistan. Drawing upon interviews with local Afghan and international staff members involved in producing online communication campaigns, the chapter reveals some of the nuanced power relations within such media portrayals. In so doing, we also draw attention to some of the unintended consequences of “positive” representations of sporting girls from the Global South, and some of the strategies employed by Sport for Youth to navigate such issues and minimize risk to staff and students.

In Chapter 8, we pivot and provide a unique look at if and how monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems within SDP can integrate feminist theories and praxis. To do this, we reflect on the planning, delivery and analysis of a MEL workshop that the authorship team codesigned with Skateistan–South Africa. In detailing this experience and exploring an alternative representational style that brings together different voices and perspectives involved in the process, this chapter comes to terms with the broad pressures faced by SDP organizations to respond to the prevailing expectations of what MEL should look like in SDP spaces. This chapter details the relationships between the international and local staff of an ASDP organization with the authors as they explore the opportunities and challenges of developing bespoke M&E skills and capacity in staff.

The book is brought to a close with a generous epilogue from leading feminist SGD scholar, Professor Martha Saavedra. As well as tracing key threads from the book, Martha reflects on the meaning of “development” and “gender and development,” and how sport fits into such categories such that we can build upon the pages of this book (and the body of research that proceeds it) to have more productive discussions of “Sport, Gender and Development” into the future. Martha grounds these conversations in her own experiences with Soccer without Borders, Moving the Goalposts and other collaborative projects before and during the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Future Trajectories for Sport, Gender and Development Research: Opportunities and Challenges

It is only possible to cover so much in one book. But we hope the offerings in these pages provide a “toolbox” for others to use, to apply, explore and extend upon. Indeed, there is much work still to be done, particularly given the rapidly changing social, economic, political and environmental conditions facing us all, differently. Thus, in this final section, we outline some of the key challenges and opportunities we see in future SGD research, particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a review of the field of SGD, Toffoletti et al. (2018) came to the conclusion that while there has been a growing abundance of research on SGD since the early 2000s, there remains a need for further examination and an increased need for research on SGD interventions – especially to better understand gender and sexuality within SDP. Other areas in the SGD realm that require further attention include (but are not certainly not limited to): “race” and antiracism, virtual programming, social entrepreneurship, COVID-19 and the “shadow pandemic”, mobility, GBV, sexual and reproductive health rights, and menstruation. Here we briefly outline these areas and urge scholars and practitioners to consider exploring these areas in future SGD studies, practice and praxis.

Concluding Thoughts

The three of us have worked collaboratively, and individually, over the years in the “SGD field,” and in other areas of scholarship and praxis. We write this book during what we suggest could quite possibly be a profound and defining moment for SGD. Our goal is to put this project in conversation with others before and after us who see the opportunities and importance of critically, yet mindfully, exploring this space. In sharing our candid stories of the challenges, tensions, strategies and (at times) “wins” that we have experienced through our work in SGD, our wish is to ignite optimism, hope, passion and possibilities for others who are currently – or aspire to be – involved in this field of research and practice. There is so much more opportunity for more ethical, thoughtful, and relevant ways of “doing” SGD research, practice and programming. Perhaps this book is a departure point.

Throughout the pages that follow, we lay bare the gendered, spatial, embodied, discursive and political logics that both inform and are informed by feminist approaches to SDP. We do not engage as much as we could with the specificities and broad diversities and contextual differences among the multiple country contexts in which we locate our research (Afghanistan, India, Nicaragua, South Africa and Uganda). We want to acknowledge here that context remains pivotal to our discussions of SGD, and we do not claim to generalize our findings to make dangerous, homogenizing and essentialist assumptions about how it operates. That is, we recognize that the specific situation and particular geographic location of the programs, participants, communities and nations studies means that it is difficult to generalize this research to other instances of SGD. However, we position this book within Fine, Tuck, and Zeller-Berkman (2008, p. 174) framework of “intersectional generalizability,” defined as:

Work that digs deep and respectfully with community to record the particulars of historically oppressed and colonized peoples/communities and their social movements of resistance, as well as work that tracks patterns across nations, communities, homes, and bodies to theorize the arteries of oppression and colonialism.

Intersectional generalizability recognizes both “theoretical” and “provocative” generalizability. Fine (2008) defines the former as gleaning lessons about social oppression and forms of resistance moving from one context to another. The latter provokes readers and audiences around the world to rethink “the possible,” and asks researchers to “move their findings toward that which is not yet imagined, not yet in practice, not yet in sight” (Fine, 2008, p. 229). We submit that this book has been framed in such a way that it may possibly take up Fine's assertions: let us reimagine a new, (post-)pandemic SGD. One that is full of possibilities, provocativity, critical thinking and (perhaps rather optimistically) hope.