The post-colonial challenges of climate change and sport for development and peace in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In the context of the contemporary sport for development and peace (SDP) sector, the environment and climate change have proven difficult to address in both policy and practice. In this paper, by drawing on interviews with policy-makers in the sector and practitioners who design and implement programming, we attempt to tease apart the tensions shaping sport for development and peace in the Anthropocene. Reading interview data through the lens of postcolonial thought, we identify relations of power and knowledge production that have shaped discourses in and of the Anthropocene, and that produce disjointed visions of if, or how, sport may contribute to the wicked problem of climate change. We argue that these disjointed visions reinforce existing hierarchies and hinder meaningful climate action in SDP. We conclude by calling on actors in SDP policy and practice to understand and implement sport in ways that contend with both local particularities and the interconnected realities of the Anthropocene.

Introduction

This paper is concerned with the issue of environmental crisis and climate change within the context of the Anthropocene and the contemporary sport for development and peace (SDP) sector. In previous work, we have explored how and why environmental issues and the challenge of climate change has yet to be taken up directly in the SDP sector, in policy and/or practice (Ali et al., 2024). Here, our concern is whether and/or how conceptualizations of environmental and climate crises – and particularly in conversation with the notion of the Anthropocene – illustrate the global complexity of climate change while also animating or igniting relatively long-standing post-colonial critiques in and of SDP. In so doing, we aim to draw out Global North/South tensions in SDP – tensions discussed previously by a host of critical researchers (Darnell and Hayhurst, 2012; Giulianotti, 2011a, 2011b; Lindsey and Grattan, 2012; Schulenkorf et al., 2016) – as they relate to the climate crisis specifically. Our overall argument, based on the results of interviews conducted with SDP policy-makers and practitioners, is that one of the main reasons that the climate crisis has yet to be taken up directly in SDP is that it connects with, highlights or even exacerbates, the unequal relations of north/south power that are fundamental to the history and politics of international development and SDP, as well as to the climate crisis itself, and that this power imbalance tends to undermine or block the actions necessary to respond challenges in and of the Anthropocene. In this way, any attempts to respond to or redress the climate crisis through the organization and mobilization of sport and SDP programs are bound to be complicated, and in some cases even compromised, by the post-coloniality of both SDP and the Anthropocene themselves, a point which we illustrate empirically throughout this paper.

The paper is organized into four main parts that follow this introduction. In the next section, we offer an overview of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene, and the ways in which these have been criticized by post-colonial scholars. This is followed by a methodological overview of the larger research project from which data for this paper is drawn. The results section is broken down into two major discursive themes and describe a third ‘sub-theme’ that describes their convergence: Disconnects between global and local visions for sport and climate, ongoing tensions and histories of inequity, and SDP and climate change as a ‘wicked problem’; Next, we take these three themes together to consider the urgency of the climate crisis and its impacts on the SDP sector. The conclusion draws out the main implications of these findings, in relation to social scientific understandings of climate, sport and development, as well as for policy frameworks and action in navigating the climate crisis through sport and into the future.

Review of literature

Overview of the climate crisis

As the increasingly devastating effects of warming temperatures continue to be felt across the world, global leaders have yet to take necessary steps toward addressing the climate crisis. January 2025 was measured as 1.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the hottest on record (Allan, 2025). And in February 2025, only 10 of 200 countries tied to the Paris Agreement – the legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted in 2015 – met the deadline to submit new objectives for reducing carbon emissions, even as UN climate chief Simon Stiell referred to these as “the most important policy documents of this century” (France 24, 2025, para. 4). While the impacts of the climate crisis tend to be thought of as universal, they are in fact disproportionately felt by marginalized populations. By 2050, the effects of climate change are estimated to displace over 200 million people from their homes, further increasing rates of internally displaced people (Davenport and Robertson, 2016). Analysts have also shown how weather-induced disasters resulting from climate change amplify economic disparities in the Global South that expose its vulnerable communities to human trafficking, sexual slavery, and labour exploitation (Ogunniyi, 2025). That climate change builds upon and further entrenches unequal geopolitical power relations first inscribed during colonization and settler colonialism (Hartnett, 2021) speaks to its post-coloniality. Reading the crisis through the lens of the Anthropocene pushes us extend our understanding of the discourse(s) of a changing climate and to engage with the fact that the planet is being materially shaped by forces unequally distributed. So, to understand the intersection of sport, development, and climate change in the Anthropocene we take seriously the imperative to unpack the relations of power that shape both discursive and material ‘responses’ to the reality described by the Anthropocene.

Climate change and SDP

There are clear implications of the climate crisis for the SDP sector, which tends to operate within the communities disproportionately impacted by climate change described above. SDP refers to the utilization of sport-based programming to achieve a variety of diverse social, behavioural, and developmental goals. Its emergence within the post World War II era is situated within the larger “post-colonial” period whereby Global South nations were framed as autonomous but underdeveloped and in need of modernization; a process which required the continued presence and intervention of “developed,” Global North nations (Millington, 2023). Within this context, sport has been utilized as a tool for peacebuilding (Darnell, 2010; Giulianotti, 2011a, 2011b), girls’ and women's empowerment (Hayhurst, 2013; Hayhurst et al., 2018a, 2018b; Rahman and Joseph, 2024), and crime prevention (Ekholm, 2019). While SDP is historically situated as operating within Global South nations, it has been utilized to promote similar goals with targeted communities in the Global North as well. These include those focused on Indigenous communities (Arellano and Downey, 2019; Essa et al., 2022) and on Indigenous Peoples who are incarcerated (Norman et al., 2023). Black, inner-city youth (Hartmann, 2016) and other populations labelled as being “at-risk” of delinquency (Pitter and Andrews, 1997) have also historically been targeted by SDP programs aiming to act as a form of crime diversion.

The United Nations has been considered an international leader in advocating for the use of sport as a development catalyst, though the closure of its office dedicated to SDP in 2017 and support of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to continue this work marked an important shift in this history (Millington, 2023). At the same time, a wide array of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – both public and private – have been attracted to the potential of sport for development given its perceived characteristics of “universality” and ability to transcend conflict and difference. Given this potential, it is unsurprising that SDP has become more recently connected to efforts aimed at prioritizing environmental protection, stemming climate change, and championing sustainable development practices (Ali et al., 2024; Darnell and Millington, 2024; Darnell, 2010; Giulianotti et al., 2018). Indeed, both the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2022) and the IOC (2017) have outlined the ways that sport might contribute to sustainable futures.

Yet, even while “SDP programs operate in a development context in which climate change is of fundamental importance” (Darnell and Millington, 2024, p. 41), there is still relatively little known about whether, or the extent to which, climate action is taken up in these initiatives. This is significant considering that both SDP policymakers and practitioners recognize the urgency of the environmental crisis (Ali et al., 2024). There are, however, multiple factors affecting the ability of SDP programs to adequately address environmental concerns. These include economic pressures facing SDP-targeted communities that influence the extent to which they can prioritize environmental objectives (Giulianotti et al., 2018); the incoherencies between SDP policies focusing on the climate and their successful implementation in the field (Lindsey and Darby, 2019); contested definitions of sustainability between policymakers and practitioners as well as the differing contexts and associated pressures that informed these definitions (Ali et al., 2024); and the increasing use of SDP amongst extractive companies operating in Indigenous communities (Millington et al., 2022; van Luijk et al., 2021). While these factors have influenced how SDP might be used to promote environmental sustainability or respond to the climate crisis, prior calls have been made by three co-authors of this paper to: (1) understand how SDP itself is implicated in the climate crisis and (2) to re-imagine SDP as an ecological endeavour that is complicit in environmental outcomes (Millington et al., 2020).

Post-colonial perspectives on the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and SDP

To meet such calls requires, at least in part, an unsettling and reconceptualization of the Anthropocene through a post-colonial lens. The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the current era in which humans have significantly impacted the planet Earth and argues that human activity rivals “some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system” (Steffen et al., 2011, 843). The emergence of the Anthropocene as a naming practice, and also a discursive feature of modernity and late-stage capitalism, has shaped policy responses, and thinking more broadly, about environmental issues. In myriad fields of research and practice, including environmental politics (e.g., Wapner, 2014), policy (e.g., Sterner et al., 2019), and technology (e.g., Blok, 2023), there is a prevailing sense of the urgency (Lynch and Veland, 2018) required to respond to climate issues, given the context and demands presented in and by the Anthropocene. Increasingly, there is also an intellectual (if not yet practical) interest in thinking with and through the Anthropocene in sport research, policy, and practice, including within SDP specifically (see Soares Moura and Scott, 2024). That said, urgency regarding the climate crisis and the Anthropocene has, in our view, been relatively difficult to pin down in SDP. We suggest this is because the concept itself is not above critique, with development scholars like McEwan (2021) arguing that critiques of the notion of the Anthropocene itself are important for thinking about the current socio- and geo-political moment and the environmental relationships that define it.

Following this, we suggest that a critical examination of the concept of the Anthropocene begins with its Eurocentric foundation. While there may not be universal consensus on the ‘starting point’ of the Anthropocene, its naming and measurement have articulated a Western worldview, at least to a degree. As a result, if taken up without critical nuance, the inequalities (racial, economic, geopolitical) that underpin the social, material, and, indeed, ecological conditions of our time risk being obscured, rather than illuminated, by the Anthropocene as a concept (McEwan, 2021). Accordingly, a critical analysis of the Anthropocene as a discourse, and a frame for policy and practice, should be attuned to the way(s) that it may reproduce or reify Eurocentric logics, knowledge, and power (Simpson, 2020). Furthermore, we believe that taking this starting point helps at once to unpack the material politics of the Anthropocene and the challenge of addressing climate change in SDP. This, in turn, impacts how policy-makers and practitioners understand and act on sustainability and climate change and whether such priorities fit (or not) into an ostensibly global SDP sector.

This perspective can also, we suggest, be understood through the notion of Orientalism, in which stories told of distant others come to serve as evidence of justification for imperial thought and action (Said, 1978). McEwan (2021), among others, has argued that Orientalism is pervasive in and through climate change and its myriad (re)actions (see Bush, 2022). In this way, the people displaced by violence, extraction, and a changing climate are not only dehumanized (McEwan, 2021) but the stories told in the Global North about southern, or ‘local’, people in the development of climate policy and practice can serve to produce Others; people less knowledgeable, less engaged, or otherwise less valuable. In this way, given the conceptual origin of the Anthropocene rooted in science, critics of the idea have exposed its role in leveraging an essential category of human and human activity (McEwan, 2021; Simpson, 2020). Such generalized definitions of ‘human activity’ can obscure racial inequality and socio-material relations and also obscure how people across time, space, and culture have interacted with/in the environment differently. In other words, many of the dominant contemporary modes of understanding the climate crisis and engagement with the natural world have themselves emerged from particularly Eurocentric historical locations structured by the inequalities of racial capitalism, colonial relations, and even differing ontological and epistemological concepts of human/extra-human interactions (McEwan, 2021).

The need to unsettle and reconceptualize the Anthropocene for its Eurocentric foundations also requires engagement with the (post)colonial roots of the SDP sector itself. Indeed, a range of scholars have employed post-colonial theory to interrogate ongoing histories of inequity and power imbalances between the global North and South (cf., Giulianotti et al., 2016; Hayhurst et al., 2018). Martha Saavedra (2019) has detailed the utility of postcolonial theory in this regard, arguing that modern sport's historical roots are entangled with those of the global postcolonial present, whereby the use of sport in the colonial era for the purposes of “progressing” colonies and its peoples is repurposed within the development era. In such a critique, SDP programs may in fact reinforce the hegemony of the global North while undermining the agency of those to whom they are directed. For example, research has shown that international SDP advocates or volunteers from the global North can bring (and attempt to impose) their own values and understandings of development, be it social and/or economic, onto local communities even if these values do not align with local needs, desires, or cultures (see Guest, 2009; Darnell, 2010). Scholars have also noted the ‘post-colonial residue’ of SDP, whereby policies and programs are located in post-colonial and post-conflict nations (see Giulianotti, 2011a, 2011b) and are aimed at tackling the fall-out of such histories, yet fail to redress global structures that perpetuate underdevelopment and as such, may ultimately maintain the status quo within hegemonic power relations (Clarke, 2023, 2024). Examples here might include the creation and implementation of ostensibly neutral SDP programs that in fact obscure the deeply political roots of conflict (see Dart, 2022). Or SDP programs that offer economic development to Indigenous communities by effectively continuing exploitative, colonial practices of resource extraction (Millington et al., 2019). In this vein, Hayhurst and Szto (2016) have argued that postcolonial theory is necessary to foreground histories of Western colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism within SDP programs, particularly those initiated in the global North, and Darnell and Hayhurst (2011) argue that centering post-colonial and anti-colonial theories of development is needed to engage with contemporary development struggles that challenge hierarchies and dominance and support decolonization in development practice, policy, and scholarship. Lastly, the links between SDP, postcolonialism, and climate change have been of increasing focus within the critical literature in the field. Here the focus rests on how colonial exploitation and industrialization in late capitalism both expropriated resources from colonies “but also created the environmental conditions that now threaten marginalized communities and developing states” (Darnell and Millington, 2024, p. 40; see also Gardam et al., 2017; Millington et al., 2019, 2022).

We recognize that these are discursive critiques, and do not necessarily reflect the material or lived realities of a changing climate, but regardless, they point to critically important ideas and relations of power that have an impact on policy, which is at the heart of the overall research project reported here. Overall, while the Eurocentrism critique problematizes the Anthropocene's origins and Orientalism highlights how these biases shape climate discourse, together they raise the possibility that sustainability practices in and through sport constitute, and are constitutive of, global inequalities. It is, in turn, these conceptual critiques that form the basis of our engagement with the data reported below. We use them, first, to understand better the discursive and power dynamics that underpin sport, and sustainability, in the Anthropocene; and second, to interrogate if, or how, these tendencies are reproduced or resisted in the relations between policy-makers and practitioners in SDP.

Methodology and methods

The research reported here is based on semi-structured interviews with eight policy-makers and seven SDP practitioners, identified using purposive and snowball sampling. We designed the study this way to develop a better understanding of the uptake, or lack thereof, of environmental action within SDP. We did so by gathering specific information from specialized groups and individuals (policy-makers and practitioners). According to Sparkes and Smith (2013) a design that uses such purposive sampling is appropriate when information is required of specific, specialized, or particular cases.

To identify participants for our ‘policy-maker’ group of interviewees, we conducted a review of grey and academic literature, including the organizational websites of the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), United Nations (UN), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These organizations and/or individuals were contacted based on their involvement in creating and/or supporting SDP policy documents and/or programs. To identify participants for our ‘SDP practitioner’ interviewee group, we conducted a search of organizations on sportanddev.org, and a purposive online search of SDP organizations. The primary inclusion criteria for contact were direct involvement in an SDP organization within the last five years. Sixty-nine individuals/organizations were contacted in the policy-maker group, and twenty-three in the practitioner group. Each of the participants possessed a requisite level of expertise to speak to SDP and climate change, or first-hand knowledge of why climate change is not a priority in SDP currently. Through snowball sampling, we were directed to organizational representatives within managerial positions, fifteen of whom agreed to an interview. Policy makers were from a variety of backgrounds and lived and worked in either Western Europe or the United States for the following organizations: the Commonwealth Secretariat (1), IOC (1), the UNDP (1), UNESCO (1), and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1), UNEP (2). One additional participant had worked in a consultancy role with a range of UN organizations. Participants from the practitioner group were also from a variety of background and locations: some lived and worked exclusively in the global North, others had residence in global North and worked in the global South. Each participant in this group worked for an organization that was initiated and operated in either Western Africa (1), Eastern Africa (5), and one in Southern Africa (1). Each organization used sport (predominantly football) as a vehicle to promote humanitarianism and positive social good, broadly defined, at both individual and societal levels.

Semi-structured interviews were used to facilitate directed but free-flowing conversations, typically lasting between 30 and 60 min. Interviews were digitally recorded, and transcribed verbatim by a third party. Participants had the opportunity to review the transcripts and make amendments. Once approved, transcripts were analyzed in vivo in the tradition of critical discourse analysis (CDA). In this methodology, discourses reflect and reproduce social relations and actively construct social realities (McGannon, 2017; Fairclough, 2003). CDA is commonly used within the social sciences to explore how discourses are structured, reflect broader “common sense” understandings of a particular topic, and reveal underlying power dynamics (Phillips and Hardy, 2002). We followed McGannon's (2017) outlined steps of CDA: reading transcripts to identify how discourses are constructive and constitutive of both objects and subjects; documenting specific words, concepts, and phrases that encapsulate such discourses; consider the discourses as coherent systems of meaning; refining and naming the discourses into the postulates identified below.

Results: (post)colonial legacies in the Anthropocene and the wicked problem of climate change

The results show that the SDP-climate nexus is shaped by 1) a prevailing sense that sport's role in addressing environmental issues should be acknowledged, despite disagreement regarding how this ought to happen; 2) ongoing tensions between the Global North and the Global South regarding needs, priorities, and knowledge in sport and sustainable development. We show that in practice, these two discursive themes converge to contribute to the wicked problem (meaning a policy issue that is recurrent, persistent, lacking in consensus and therefore difficult to solve) and of addressing climate change (in part) through sport. Taken together, these themes suggest that recognition or desire to attend to the climate crisis is rarely at issue, but that geo-political complexity and post-colonial tensions inherent in the Anthropocene make a coherent response to climate change in SDP difficult to enact. In the section that follows, we have separated these two discursive themes by subheadings that illustrate the discourse described, and produced, by our research participants. We conclude the section by describing a discursive convergence around a ‘sub-theme,’ the complexity and ‘wickedness’ of climate change and its relationship to sport.

Disconnects between global and local visions for sport and climate

The first major discursive theme developed from our interviews with SDP stakeholders was that despite an increasing focus on climate change within the sector, there remained a prominent disconnect between global and local priorities, recalling long-standing critiques of SDP policy. These disconnects become particularly obvious when they are read alongside the discursive construction – offered by both practitioners and policy-makers – of the environment in general and climate change in particular as fundamental to the future of SDP. In other words, our participants acknowledged that SDP should do something for climate change, but the (potential) role of sport, the place of the environment within the hierarchy of development objectives, and the challenges of implementing contextually impactful and specific versions of sustainability policies aimed at ‘global’ problems like climate change, were all cited as challenges.

Climate change is recognized as an urgent, important concern

Policy-makers were eager to note a shift in recent years with climate change presenting an “existential crisis,” and a “pivotal moment” (Policy-maker 1) for SDP. As a result, environmental sustainability is now “on top of the agenda” and people “all over the world agree now that climate change is the biggest issue” in policy-making (Policy-maker 2). In this regard, Policy-maker 3 noted that both policy-makers and SDP practitioners shared this view:

I've been impressed many times with you know how [SDP organizations] understood the relevance and importance of climate … it's quite interesting to see that within these couple of years the capacity of these [organizations have] increased, they are more interested in reading and understanding about where this world is going in terms of climate.

SDP practitioners also noted that climate change and sustainability efforts have taken increased priority within the operations of the organizations they had worked for and with. For example, Practitioner 1 noted that SDP organizations have and should “employ environment for sustainability as one of their key projects” and that it should be done in a manner that is continuous to “build capacities of people in environmental sustainability.” Similarly, Practitioner 2 argued that:

one of the biggest supports that the community in sports for development world can give environmental sustainability is being environmentally conscious; things like us helping … to implement the policies on environmental consciousness – like littering, for example, noise pollution, travelling consciously.

It was clear to us that there is a sense among participants that SDP has come to recognize the importance of the environment and sustainability. At the least, we found that participants seem to actively contribute to the discursive construction of sport as a potential actor in the face of a changing climate.

Visions of the sport-development-climate nexus are disjointed

However, there remained a lack of clarity as to how sport can or should be used as a tool of climate action in a local development context, and indeed, whether sport can possibly play such a role given its questionable environmental impact more generally. Here, we noted a disconnect between practitioners and policy-makers regarding their vision for sport. There was little consensus about how to actualize the priority (or not) and appropriateness (or not) of climate action within sport and SDP, despite the fact that both groups agreed on its importance. For some, like Policy-maker 1, while climate change is an important issue, global sustainability approaches may fail to align with local development priorities:

[F]or communities that are suffering in extreme poverty often a high proportion of people in poverty are in rural areas to start with. Yeah, I mean so rural livelihoods were quite…are the most directly tied to the environment compared to other sectors of the economy … as I said like a hundred million people will be pushed into poverty over the coming decades because just because of climate change … The premise that environmental policy seems to be a bit detached from those challenges that you mentioned but I think that is, those things are converging in a lot stronger way.

Some participants also suggested that the lack of climate prioritization in SDP was tied to sport's poor environmental track record, and they found it difficult to separate SDP programs and policies from the broader sport sector and its well-documented environmental impacts. A general theme for policy-makers was the dual task facing sport and the SDP sector: to reduce the environmental footprint of the sport sector itself and then to use the power of sport to promote climate action. Herein laid a contradiction: sport cannot be taken seriously as a tool of sustainable development when the global consumer-capitalist nature of sport has a profound environmental impact. In this regard, Policy-maker 2 pointed to the excesses of the sport industry which compromised its sustainability potential:

I felt it was reaching a point of decadence almost now the weight sport had in our lives – the consumed sport not the practiced sport – but the consumption of sport events has reached a level or had reached a level that was beyond … we have to reconsider this whole thing. … the connection between this glamorous world of sport and this mega level of sports with grassroots.

Similarly, Policy-maker 6 noted that while many sport organizations promote their sustainable development credentials, their carbon footprints undermine such global efforts:

[N]ow there's more, a lot more discussions about how sport is affecting the environment. You know even major organized, major events such as the Olympics. How many people are flying from different parts of the world to displace these emissions? … we're supposed to have SDGs by 2030. We have less than ten years now basically. If we want to achieve these goals by 2030 there is a need to significantly step up the pace at which we're trying to achieve these things.

So, while many in the SDP sector recognized the location of sport in the Anthropocene, there remains uncertainty about if, or how, development practices including SDP can or should react. Ultimately, a shared belief in the threat posed by climate change was challenged by the lack of consensus regarding global and local visions for SDP and climate change. Part of this disconnect may be explained by the inherent dynamics of the policy-driven, top-down nature of (at least the funding) the SDP sector. Policy-maker 5 described such tensions:

It's interesting cause there's a sort of fundamental tension at the heart of … policymaking in this area. Because the evidence tells us and there's probably two key points of analysis from the research and evidence in this space. One is that community-led, contextually relevant, locally driven interventions are most effective and have been shown to deliver the most substantial sort of impact … [compared to] top-down Global North directed approaches but point being we know that locally led contextual specific approaches are most effective and deliver the most essential impact.

This quotation reveals an important political element to the tension inherent in this disconnected vision for sport and the climate: the global support of or movement towards attending to climate issues in and through SDP is made difficult by: a) sport's poor environmental track record, b) the need for locally relevant and contextual approaches and c) the post-colonial residue of both international development and global sport. In effect, while the policy frameworks and technical knowledge required to address the climate crisis may flow predominately from the North to the South, such flows are complicated, as Policy-maker 4 described, by the fact that “grassroots involvement and engagement is probably more efficient” than policies with a more global focus. This effectively reanimates long-standing tensions in SDP, namely that in practice, SDP programs are the external imposition of a global North policy agenda and programming approach. What is needed are local initiatives. Policy-maker 4 continued:

I think that the smaller activities are the ones that make the bigger impact because they are worldwide, they are impacting first of all the preservation, the better, the improvement of the preservation of the environment and also the fact that we are talking about athletes, women and men, of all ages and being engaged in some activities related to environmental protection or sustainability.

Practitioner 3 also spoke to such needs, focusing in particular on tensions between the Global North and South:

We talk about sustainability and … this is about the environment, but I don't think it's only about the environment. …We know that grassroots sport can [help] from a health sector perspective, from an education perspective. We know that it's also less heavy on environment than big events, obviously. So, I just think that actually there's a bigger sustainability question around you know why are there such inequities in the sport sector and why is there such limited resources for you know certain groups of people, certain places, certain settings.

In this regard, the tension identified by SDP stakeholders with respect to global and local priorities speaks to broader tensions surrounding development writ large and ongoing histories of inequity, which we tease out in the second overarching discursive theme. Here, Policy-maker 6 argued that while SDP policies in this context foreground climate change, there remains a disconnect between the lived realities of a changing environment in the Global South, as well as an inter-generational divide regarding who will be impacted most, two factors that are often not addressed in international policy making.

So, the youth are a lot more exposed. …the environment is changing so you know you have a lot more wildfires now across Africa you have a lot more natural disasters which were never commonplace in, you know back in the day … we need to act now. And something that is you know a core message that young people are passing among themselves is the fact that the older generation have sort of lived their lives and they will not be here to suffer the consequences of their actions. It is them; it is us younger people that will suffer these consequences because we are the ones that will still be here hopefully in the next 40 years.

Here, we see aspects of our first discursive theme: Disconnects between global and local visions for sport and climate, converging. Policy-maker 6 argues that ‘we need to act now’ but also acknowledges the reality of disconnected visions of SDP and climate change. This convergence, we argue, provides the basis for our second discursive theme, wherein we attempt to tease further apart the balance of urgency (‘we need to act now’) and disconnected visions regarding what role sport can or should play in addressing climate change globally and locally.

Ongoing histories of inequity contribute to ineffective climate policies

The second discursive theme developed from our interviews flows from the disconnects identified in the first and concerns geo-political tensions between the Global North and the Global South. In the interviews, there was an overall sense that attention to the environment and sustainability in SDP is compromised by issues systemic to development itself. The disconnections between policy-making and implementation identified in discursive theme one speak to a much larger, systemic tension pertaining to ongoing histories of inequities between the Global North and South. Indeed, such histories inform the ostensible ‘need’ for sustainable development and SDP programs in the first place but also animate responses to climate change and sustainable development in the Anthropocene. Both participant groups in our interviews noted the impacts and importance of recognizing how (neo)colonial continuities inform much of the (sport for) development apparatus; yet, there was an overriding sense that exclusion of global South perspectives and realities leads to ineffective climate policies.

North-South power dynamics continue to shape policy and practice

With respect to how (neo)colonial continues shape policies and practices, policy-makers noted a dependency model within SDP, a hallmark of both the colonial and development eras. Policy-maker 2 spoke to the impact of such a model:

The SDP community is very much a community in which there is assistance from the north to the south and in which this logic still very much prevails (i.e., exactly a lack of sustainability in the design of these projects and a lack of ownership). So, a lot of these SDP initiatives break down the moment the funding from the north is disrupted; right, so there is an assistance dependence that we see also in many other areas of course even at macro levels. (emphasis added)

For practitioners, these ongoing histories of inequity were manifest in concerns about the top-down nature of SDP policies, concerns about funding, and a ‘helicopter’ model of development whereby authorities from the Global North drop into Global South localities without adequate consultation. With respect to power dynamics in policy-making, Practitioner 5 argued that “it should be down-top initiatives, not [a] top-down initiative” as such an approach leads to competition and duplication amongst SDP organizations: “you find that [in] one governmental organization, five [groups] are doing on the same program instead of them coming together and maybe supporting an existing program.”

For other practitioners, like Practitioner 3, the funding model of SDP itself reflected historical inequalities between the Global North and South as it requires certain conditions be met to receive economic support. “On the funding perspective,” Practitioner 3 argued, “you know there's a lot of funding obviously comes from Europe or the States. And related to these programs and comes with certain you know conditions attached…you know so it's not always necessarily aligned” between the Global North and South. Further, in their view, these conditions were informed by research conducted by those in the Global North, again, reflecting forms of systemic inequalities. Practitioner 3 continued:

I do think that there are, there is a real need and recognition recently of the need to be contextually appropriate … I mean people are producing knowledge in this part of the world, but you know if you just look statistically at the amount of academic publications or the journal articles, any of that I mean it's massive. You know it's massively unequal and that's not any sport's problem. That's across the, you know that's a result of much broader systemic inequalities

Practitioner 4 also picked up on this theme of where knowledge is being produced, and how inequalities in funding and tensions in priorities between the Global North and South:

The problem with this is the data is being collected, the information is being collected from Africa taken to Europe and then it's being refined and documented and then it's brought back here as an expert's information from Europe … so for them they target international donors with an intention of getting more funding but not necessarily to do what needs to be done because it's like you are selling your context out and we don't want that. … That's not what we want because we feel that the researchers by then they didn't do justice to this because for them they forgot that there are experts in the South who have lived with sports for development programs for years in their lives.

Here, Practitioner 4 describes a process by which knowledge is gathered in the Global South and then repackaged as expertise in the Global North for the purpose of securing funding. This echoes critiques previously made regarding the SDP sector (Nicholls et al., 2011), but our postcolonial reading of this data suggests that environmental or climate ‘knowledge’ is subject to the same power relations.

Finally, throughout our interviews with practitioners, there was an undercurrent of critique regarding the entire development model, particularly concerning its reliance upon, and perpetuation of, longstanding power dynamics between the Global North and South. There was a recognition that policies written in the Global North at times did not meet the needs of the context in which they were meant to be implemented. For Policy-maker 2, such a disconnect was profound:

I have strong doubts about development in general which is, might be odd for a person working in [redacted] but I am very doubtful. … there is this issue of to what extent can we export our thinking, our well-intended thinking to other local contexts and I think in sport there has been a sort of traditional charity mindset, right, that is about to change. There's a few things that are really stopping results oriented and measurable [outcomes]. … is not so much unity in this movement that should be much more unified because you know we all share the same objectives.

Such ‘well-intended thinking’ reflects a common theme in the critical SDP literature and the role of sport in the development apparatus, whereby sport is understood to offer individual benefit, but may fail to redress systemic issues of inequality, and in fact maintain the status quo with respect to international dynamics. Such notions are reflected in the second discursive sub-theme.

For our participants, the concern for power dynamics and a failure to address systemic inequalities were not only directed towards the development apparatus as a whole, but within SDP and with questions for the climate in particular. While sport was viewed as a means to raise awareness of environmental issues, the tangible benefits to the environment were more difficult to ascertain or achieve. Practitioner 4 highlighted such issues:

The problem we are having in Kenya and maybe in Tanzania is that even though we have organizations that are trying to push the environment agenda but we are not living that…now besides awareness creation we also need people who are educated on this … But I feel that the environment thing not being entrenched into our socioeconomic development pillars it becomes also senseless.

The tensions identified here is clear: SDP programs and policies may advocate for climate action, yet this action does not extend into or articulate with broader socioeconomic barriers to development, and the lived realities of the development context. Such was the focus of the next discursive sub-theme.

Sub-theme: sport and climate change as a wicked problem in SDP

The discursive themes discussed to this point coalesce into a need for broader systemic changes to SDP (and the sport industry); they also point to the complex and multi-faceted nature of climate change and the role of sport therein. In other words, it is a wicked problem without clear solutions. Here, we begin to see the complex shape of the intersection of sport and development in the Anthropocene. While sport and the environment are being discursively positioned as intertwined aspects of the future of (development in) the Anthropocene by policy-makers, funders, and influential sport organizations like the International Olympic Committee, there is a parallel recognition that sport may be fundamentally ill-equipped to make a ‘positive’ difference.

The open-ended, complex, and all-encompassing threat of climate change posed significant problems for policy-makers and practitioners in the design and delivery of SDP policies and programs. A prevailing question here was ‘how do we know whether sustainable development initiatives are successful?’ For policy-makers, two broad trends were noted: the first pertained to a lack of knowledge regarding climate solutions, and the second to capacities, resources, and implementation. With regard to the former, one policy-maker noted that while there was a desire to take on climate actions by SDP practitioners, “they weren’t really knowledgeable or ready to take on anything…so it was clear that there was no systemic approach to doing things differently and there was no, you know there was no idea really to start switching” (Policy-maker 3). This lack of knowledge even led to some degree of despondency, with a sense that it was “not our duty …we’re not here to solve the climate” (Policy-maker 3). As for the latter, Policy-maker 5 noted that implementing policies to promote sustainability and combat climate change were particularly challenging given the capacities and resources available to SDP organizations: “How much of this is an issue and how much priority should be put on sports for all as an educator and advocate and so here are the majors and there's some of the sort of challenges if they're the results that we're trying to measure.” The challenges of developing policies that made a meaningful impact with respect to sustainable development and climate change were similarly noted by Policy-maker 6:

…to be honest with you at the UN level or we see the global organizations what I have found now is that they are beautifully, beautifully rich in policies everywhere you know that address all these issues – but the main challenge is there's an implementation gap.

This concern for implementing SDP programs that were effective and impactful in addressing climate change was also recognized by practitioners, but in a manner that highlighted the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change. For practitioners, using sport to promote sustainable development presents complex problems to which there are no easy solutions and fewer means to measure and evaluate impacts. For Practitioner 1, the traditional means of monitoring and evaluation did not apply in this context, noting that “normally, we’ll find many people just trying to say, okay we trained these people, this number changed, and this number is doing this,” but in the context of climate change such an approach wasn’t feasible or effective. Practitioner 3 articulated a similar view, particularly for sport:

I think the challenge again with these indicators is that because this is a new field you know we were able to dig up data for example on other indicators; percentage of population physically active and actually show you know that, how this indicator can be used but with environmental indicators and with sustainability indicators that would be a lot more tricky…It's also difficult to measure the contribution of sport. It's difficult to isolate the role of sport.

Ultimately, the problem of climate change, with its complexities and open-ended nature contributed to disconnects between different visions of sport's contribution to sustainability, and the challenges of implementing such interventions in a context marked by the centrality of European expertise, resources, and ‘global’ priorities. In many ways, these disconnects in policies and practices spoke to long-standing tensions between the Global North, where much of the SDP policies are created, and the Global South, where they are meant to be implemented.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we have demonstrated that the Anthropocene has contributed to a heightened sense of the importance of the environment in and for SDP policy and practice, but also that the ability to implement a coherent response to climate change within the SDP sector is challenged by postcolonial tensions, particularly in operationalizing environmental concerns at the local level. Postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene and climate crisis provided a sensitizing concept through which we analyzed the perceived importance of the environment and climate change in SDP, and through which we make some sense of the politics of knowledge and SDP policy and practice in the Anthropocene. In addition, these critiques have helped us to tease out a particular tension and an important nuance in the realm of SDP, the environment, and climate change: that the discourse(s) of the Anthropocene contribute to a permission structure favouring retrenched (neo)colonial power structures and flows of knowledge SDP.

Our interviews demonstrated that for both policy-makers and practitioners, the environment and, more specifically, climate change is increasingly present and deemed important, as both a policy priority and form of action in SDP. That said, our interview participants showed some uncertainty about if, and how, environmental concerns could or should come into play in the day-to-day activities of SDP. As a result, we suggest that while recognizing the reality of the Anthropocene has galvanized perceptions of the importance of the environment, the complexity of genuinely sustainable development, and the urgency of the climate crisis, it has offered little to no clarity on what is to be done in SDP, and how, beyond stakeholders operating in a more ‘reciprocal’ relationship with the natural environment.

The results themselves are therefore ambivalent. In our first discursive theme, SDP policy-makers and practitioners have increasingly centered the importance of the environment, both as a general issue and given that they see SDP funding and funders increasingly emphasize the environment. However, holding space for both global and local visions of sport in the context of the Anthropocene appears to be challenging for both policy-makers and practitioners in SDP. This is because, as revealed by our second discursive theme, efforts to effectively ‘address’ climate change through sport are challenging, not only because of issues of scale, but also because of longstanding unequal processes of knowledge production and relations of power. In this sense, we argue that deploying sport towards sustainable development in the Anthropocene, and/or addressing the climate crisis in and through SDP in fact calls for a recalibration of whose knowledge counts in SDP to what ends such knowledge is to be applied. In this sense, the issue of climate tends to be different for policy-makers and practitioners along geo-political lines, in terms of setting objectives (what can or should sport do?) and understanding what ‘success’ looks like in diverse contexts. This is, we suggest, a line of analysis that has not yet been brought to bear on the topic of SDP and climate change, or at least not with the significance it deserves or requires given the data.

Taken together, these two discursive themes then contribute to our ‘sub-theme’: that SDP continues to be fraught with tensions between the local and the global, the Global North and the Global South, and that the perspectives of policy-makers and practitioners illustrate climate change in SDP to be a wicked problem, one that is persistent but with no clear consensus or popular solution. Indeed, we argue that the challenge of environmental sustainability in the current SDP sector is situated at the convergence of the urgency and importance of climate change and the complexity presented by the disconnect and tensions between the Global North and the Global South in the Anthropocene. This convergence echoes and even reveals something particular about the politics of climate change, sustainability, and the Anthropocene writ large. While our research participants spoke at length about the importance of the environment in/through sport, they also identified a perceived lack of knowledge regarding how such concerns could be operationalized locally. Owing to this, the social and epistemological relations, including ecological connections, between the Global North and the Global South remain bifurcated (Go, 2016), thereby defaulting to traditional hierarchies of knowledge that seem to privilege Eurocentric, technocratic authorities. This is happening precisely at the time when global responses are urgently required.

The challenge is, we suggest, fundamentally political, conceptual and/or discursive, rather than technical, even though that is currently how it is being played out. Indeed, because of the complexity of cause and effect in climate change, and even the challenges that participants identified in monitoring and evaluation, the data point to a tendency to default to the technocratic regimes and policies that previously shaped much development practice in general and the SDP sector in particular. Put differently, policy-makers and practitioners have recognized that the environment matters, and that climate change cannot be ignored; however, in the absence of an easily defined set of objectives and in the context of increasing ecological urgency and political fracturing, the oft-critiqued (e.g., Darnell and Hayhurst, 2012), practices of modernist or top-down development remain in ascendance. This is despite the recognition by our interviewees that such top-down approaches were not optimal, and that locally-driven solutions had a higher likelihood of success (Nicholls et al., 2011). However, the Anthropocene as a global phenomenon seems to create something of an impetus or even permission structure to return to these familiar power and knowledge hierarchies. Thus, not only is the concept of the Anthropocene vulnerable to a critique of Eurocentrism, but at least in SDP policy and practice it seems to risk producing a Eurocentric response to the complex challenges presented by climate change and other environmental issues.

In addition, the results in this paper extend previous post-colonial analyses and critiques of SDP by showing that the unequal power relations – or post-colonial residue – of SDP not only does an injustice to local communities and SDP practitioners by subjecting them to hegemonic understandings of development and sport, but also that these imbalances make it difficult to conceptualize and implement a response to global challenges, like the climate crisis or broader responses in the Anthropocene, in locally resonant ways. Issues such as the need for local SDP organizations to attend to other development priorities, or the carbon footprint of the global sport sector, undermine the global solidarity that would help to support locally suitable SDP responses within the Anthropocene.

Recognizing the discursive construction of the Anthropocene and SDP's (uncertain) place within the policy apparatus responding to it, we offer two related but distinct perspectives for policy-makers to consider. First, our postcolonial reading of SDP in the Anthropocene suggests, similar to other critical development scholars (e.g., McEwan, 2021), that alternative epistemological and even ontological approaches to policy may be required in order to pursue a just future. Postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene will continue to illustrate the uneven consequences of climate change, and to analyze, not obscure, the intersections of race, class, and gender (among others) that complicate apolitical notions of the ‘global’. In the SDP literature, in particular, Soares Moura and Scott (2024) suggest that ‘glocalization’ is a framework that might help to address some of these critiques. Others have drawn on Spivak (2003) (and subsequently, Chakrabarty (2021)) to argue for ‘planetarity’ or planetary thinking (McEwan, 2021; Mould, 2023) based on acknowledgement or centering of difference (and relatedness) rather than global thinking and its tendency towards universalizing. From a policy standpoint, this re-emphasizes the need not just for participatory approaches in SDP research and practice but, indeed, for approaches designed to respond specifically to local and contextual needs. In other words, the political, social, and ecological contexts in which SDP practitioners operate should be understood as specific and interrelated. Policy and programming should be designed to ensure that local (sustainable) development needs are not subsumed by global rhetoric that treats the human relationship with the environment as uniform and universal but rather, that SDP objectives are both local and systemic. The urgency of the climate crisis should not serve to make policy-makers in SDP rush past ethical development practices but rather redouble their efforts to focus on best practices that accommodate multi-directional flows of information and power.

Our data suggest that this is particularly challenging in the Anthropocene because of the scale, complexity, and urgency of the climate crisis and other attendant environmental issues. So, second, and in conclusion, we suggest that policy-makers and practitioners in SDP understand and position their activities to specifically address (their) sport's relationship to the environment at the ‘local’ level. While climate change is a ‘global’ challenge, its mechanics and, indeed, its effects are not ‘universally’ felt. A planetary approach to SDP in the Anthropocene would eschew the traditional model of a globalized SDP and instead fund and deliver programming specifically designed to address diverse and locally relevant ecological concerns. In practice, this means recognizing the knowledge and needs of communities facing diverse environmental challenges in designing programming with a genuine environmental sensitivity.