ABSTRACT
Definition of a policy area or of a set of government activities is nearly always problematic: what starts as an apparently straightforward process of positivist-oriented empirical description soon becomes mired in ambiguity as attempts to define ‘sports development’ confirm. Rejecting the positivist approach to policy analysis, Fischer (2003: 51) argues that ‘To accurately explain social phenomena, the investigator must first of all attempt to understand the meaning of the social phenomenon from the actor’s perspective … the actor’s own motives and values.’ Furthermore, the meaning of policy is not static as will be made clear below in relation to sports development. While the investigation of policy will generate empirical data of great value to the policy analyst, the data are unlikely to produce social categories sufficiently robust to satisfy the positivist researcher. One of the reasons for the need to treat empirical observations with care is that they are often related to a specific time and place. Thus concepts such as ‘regular participation’, ‘sport’, ‘physical education’, ‘physical activity’ and ‘moderate exercise’ have all been redefined over the last forty years. A second reason why positivist methods are insufficient to define a policy area is that, despite regular expressions of commitment to evidence-based policy, policy-makers are just as likely to be influenced by the mythology that develops around policy and which takes on the status of ‘truths’ even though the evidence base is weak. According to Coalter (2007: 9), ‘such myths contain elements of truth, but elements which become reified and distorted and “represent” rather than reflect reality, standing for supposed, but largely unexamined, impacts and processes.’ Coalter’s argument has much in common with Hajer’s (1995) concept of policy ‘storylines’ which, according to Fischer (2003: 88), ‘function to condense large amounts of factual information inter-mixed with the normative assumptions and value orientations that assign meaning to them … [Storylines] stress some aspects of an event and conceal or downplay others.’ Sports development is replete with such myths and storylines, which generate and preserve (generally positive) perceptions of sports development on the basis of weak evidence. While it is important to acknowledge that sports development is far from unique in having a weak evidence base (criminal justice, defence, education and even medicine all have their share of storylines and myths), Coalter’s injunction to ‘think more clearly, analytically and less emotionally about “sport” and its potential’ (2007: 7) is important to bear in mind. In other words any attempt to define sports development and assess its impact needs to be accompanied by a healthy dose of scepticism.
