ABSTRACT
Defining sport development and drawing a definitive boundary around the scope of its activities and stakeholders is recognized as a difficult task (Houlihan and White, 2002). The problem in defining sport development is exacerbated by the various forms it has taken over the last 40 years. Houlihan and White (2002) argued that sport development in the UK was conceptualized as facility development between the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, as a welfare instrument from then until the early 1990s, as a suite of differentiated programmes during the early to late 1990s, and presently as two discrete programmes, namely elite and community focused. Similar transitions are evident in how sport development has been conceptualized by governments in Australia, Canada and New Zealand over this period (Eady, 1993; Stewart et al., 2004; Watt, 2003).
