ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to examine the delivery of sport development, within a UK context, with specific reference to the notion of organisational capacity as a structural condition that has been engineered, from national to local level, to incorporate a number of partner sporting and non-sporting agencies under the steerage of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Indeed capacity building has become a common refrain in the language of sports (policy) development in the UK (DCMS/Strategy Unit, 2000, 2002; Carter, 2005; Sport England, 2007a) and if it is to have any significant discursive value must necessarily form part of the interrogation of the practice of sports development. It is in this context that the national level focus on capacity building as set out in Game Plan (DCMS, 2002), which amounted to the upskilling and training of sports professionals and volunteers, the drafting in of expertise and the general professionalising of key systems, needs careful interpretation as much for the intended outcomes but also for the immanent outcomes (see Chapter 1 in this volume).
