ABSTRACT
This chapter has two aims. The first is to provide a practical example of the evaluation of theoretical perspectives on sports policy through their application to explain the initiation and development of a particular transnational policy initiative, the emergence of Olympic Solidarity. The second aim is to address the third of the core difficulties which were identified in Chapter 1 as a key to understanding the limitations affecting the development of comparative sports policy analysis, that is, the growing recognition of the significance of the western, and therefore partial, origins of sport as a phenomenon and also of sports policy studies as an academic domain. The advent of post-colonial and postmodern theories in particular has underlined the peculiarly partial view of what constitutes the truth or adequacy of an account and therefore of which statements about sports policy systems might he claimed to be 'true' or to provide an adequate basis for explanation of such systems.
