ABSTRACT
It is claimed that sport-for-development is a ‘new field’ in its ‘formative stage’ (Kay, 2009: 1177) and that there is an ‘evidence gap’ (Woodcock et al., 2012: 370). It is clear that at an ideological and policy level, sport-for-development has some of the characteristics of an emerging, if still disparate, new ‘movement’ (Kidd, 2008; Giulianotti, 2011; Darnell, 2007). However, at the level of practice and implementation — at the level of programme mechanisms, which are one of the concerns of this book — the claims to ‘newness’ are at least contestable. In part this is because the legitimacy of sport-for-development is derived from the fact that it is not new.
