Social leveraging of the 2010 Olympic Games: ‘sustainability’ in a City of Vancouver initiative

Abstract

Heightened inter-city competition for hosting sport mega-events has increased the involvement of levels of government. Governments are seeking to achieve public policy objectives using the sport mega-event as a vehicle to do so. The emergence of the concept of social leveraging is important to understand the involvement of host governments in attempts to amend, fast-track, or generate new public policy, curriculum, community programmes, and demonstration projects. This article presents a case study of the City of Vancouver's newly emerging post-Olympic Greenest City initiative. The purpose of this case study of social leveraging is to better understand this concept in the context of hosting the 2010 Olympic Games and the City of Vancouver's development of a sustainability business brand. This case study is explored according to Chalip [Chalip, L. (2006). Towards social leverage of sport events. Journal of Sport & Tourism, 11, 109–127. doi:10.1080/14775080601155126] and O'Brien and Chalip's [O'Brien, D., & Chalip, L. (2007a). Executive training exercise in sport event leverage. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 1, 296–304. doi:10.1108/17506180710824181; O'Brien, D., & Chalip, L. (2007b). Sport events and strategic leveraging: Pushing towards the triple bottom line. In A.G. Woodside & D. Martin (Eds.), Tourism management: Analysis, behavior, and strategy (pp. 318–338). Cambridge: CABI] framework of social leveraging. Case study analysis offers evidence that suggests that social leveraging does conceptualize the efforts by government hosts to maximize benefits from their intensive investments in sport mega-events. Findings also extend the exploratory framework of social leveraging by considering additional leverageable resources that government officials utilize, especially as these resources might fast-track policy objectives. Our research also suggests amending the sequence of and the parts of this framework in order to elaborate on social leveraging as an iterative rather than linear process.