Hegemony, postcolonialism and sport-for-development: a response to Lindsey and Grattan

Abstract

In their article in this volume, entitled ‘An “international movement”? Decentering sport for development within Zambian communities”, Iain Lindsey and Alan Grattan (2012) highlight important issues of agency, locality, diversity and culture within the current mobilization of sport to meet international development goals. Drawing on valuable fieldwork in Zambia, the authors suggest that prior research may have overstated the solidity and boundaries of an ‘international’ movement towards sport-for-development and exaggerated the influence of northern initiatives in the Global South and the hegemony of neoliberal development policy. As two of the authors whose work is evaluated, we offer a rejoinder in which we suggest that Lindsey and Grattan's analyses are important and insightful but best viewed as complementary to the critical analyses of northern-led development and neoliberalism. Drawing on Gramscian hegemony and postcolonial theory, we make the case for a renewed commitment to the issues of power and resistance in the mobilization of sport to meet international development goals.