Abstract
This article examines the ‘Sport Works’ narrative of sport‐for‐development practitioners of an inter‐organisational sport‐for‐development (SfD) programme utilising rugby to foster positive social transformation in Brazil. In doing so, we address an under‐representation of practitioners who are often seen as subjugated voices in SfD programmes. The paper also addresses an under‐representation of Brazil as a research site in SfD literature. Following several site visits and interviews with practitioners, our data concludes that despite a novel context of Brazil and the alternative values to football offered through the sport of rugby, practitioners and programme managers maintain dominant narratives of social transformation through sport without clear monitoring and evaluation.
Highlights
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Where rugby is promoted as a development tool its values and potential to produce social change dominated the narrative of managers and street bureaucrats, and this was often juxtaposed with the sport of football
Evidence demonstrated that for coaches, part of their aim was to ‘recalibrate’ the participants using the core values of rugby, an idea found in the dominant vision for SfD programmes
Summary
General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. This article examines the ‘Sport Works’ narrative of sport-for-development practitioners of an inter-organisational sport-for-development (SfD) programme utilising rugby to foster positive social transformation in Brazil. The paper addresses an under-representation of Brazil as a research site in SfD literature. This paper examines a multi-state inter-organisational sport-for-development (SfD) programme utilising rugby to foster positive development in Brazil. This paper contributes to the SfD literature by addressing an under-representation of ‘street bureaucrats’ and managers, building on Harris and Adams (2016); under-representation of Brazil, and more broadly Latin America as a research site (Schulenkorf, Sherry and Rowe, 2016); and an over-representation of football SfD programmes (see Schulenkorf et al, 2016). Three research questions guide this study: (a) What is unique about rugby as a social and development
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