Sport for social cohesion: exploring aims and complexities

Over recent years, the field of sport for development (SFD) has seen a substantial growth in the number of initiatives leveraging sport as a means of promoting social development outcomes. Despite advances in this field, the extent to which social cohesion has been researched in SFD is contested. While past research suggests that a substantial amount of SFD literature focuses on social cohesion, a closer look at the definition and conceptualisation of social cohesion in this context indicates that the term is often used as a catch-all to describe research and programming that focuses on a broad range of sociological concepts. In this paper, we explore how social cohesion is defined in the context of a SFD initiative, the complexities of defining social cohesion, and how this shapes management practices. Adopting an ethnographic approach over two years, we collected data via research observations, reflexive journal entries, organisational documents, and semi-structured interviews. Overall, findings indicated that the initiative struggled to define social cohesion, and this had ramifications upon managerial practices and strategy. Further, this had a flow-on effect upon programs, contributing to deteriorations in social networks and issues with socio-cultural assumptions.The SFD initiative struggled to define and operationalise cohesion.Ill-defined aims had an impact upon managerial practices and strategy.Programs declined and reinforced cultural boundaries and assumptions.Neoliberal interpretations of cohesion can inadvertently promote ‘sameness’.