No abstract

Events legacies have become a common feature in the public policy rhetoric surrounding sport events of all sizes. Public policy planners and event organizers are increasingly promoting the legacies of sport events to justify significant investments required to host them. Within the context of special events, legacy is most often recognized as the long-term or permanent outcomes for a host city from staging an event. These outcomes include potential economic, tourism, social, physical, and/or environmental factors. However, the justification of legacies from events remains complicated due to inconsistent conceptualizations of legacy across academic and industry practice. While legacy is an increasing component of event bids as well as funding justifications and postevent reports, the concept itself has attracted limited critical analysis. This article puts forth a comprehensive review of literature that has sought to define legacy, from 1991–2008, drawing on event management, sport management, and urban planning contexts. An inductive interpretive analysis of definitions was undertaken, in which key considerations were identified and definitions assessed against these. The analysis revealed five key considerations of legacy in application to the sport event management context. In doing so, this article contributes to both theoretical debate and improved strategic practice surrounding the emergence of “legacy” as justification for staging sport events.

Sport events are believed to promote dialogue, integration, and peaceful understanding among disparate groups, even when other forms of negotiation have not been successful. However, the social outcomes from sport events are largely anecdotal and there is a need to empirically examine the active engagement of groups with "others" in participatory sport event projects. This article investigates the potential of an intercommunity sport event in contributing to intergroup development and social capital building in the ethnically divided Sri Lanka. It follows an interpretive mode of inquiry where findings are derived from the analysis of 35 in-depth interviews with Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and international event stakeholders. By providing evidence of the varying sociocultural experiences at the event, this article discusses the event's impact on intergroup relations and its influence on the stock of social capital available to communities. Findings can assist governments, policy makers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in advancing policies and practical measures that build on events as vehicles and catalysts for enhanced intergroup relations and the creation of social capital.

Sport participation as a legacy of the Olympic Games (OG) has frequently featured as a component of the "legacy package" that government bodies and organizing committees promote to the local communities to gain support for the hosting of these mega-events. However, only recently increased sport participation has been explicitly included as part of a legacy plan in OG candidature files. This article examines the changes and development of sport legacy planning and implementation from Sydney 2000, London 2012, and Rio 2016. The three case studies confirm that sport participation legacies are only achieved if host governments engage the community, develop long-term strategies, and coordinate efforts between different government portfolios and with a range of relevant stakeholders. So far, there is limited evidence available to demonstrate that relevant government bodies have attempted to strategically leverage the Games with the purpose of developing a sport participation legacy for the wider population.

Given the rising global use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by professional sport organisations, this paper acts to consolidate the state of scholarly research using a systematic quantitative literature review. Our aim was to critically analyse the literature on CSR and professional sport organisations and in doing so ask, how is the global research at the nexus of sport and CSR poised to deliver social good? Our findings indicate the presence of variability in approaches to investigating CSR in professional sport, and the lack of discrete reporting of target audiences and initiatives evidenced across our sample. We suggest there is potential to learn from other disciplinary approaches to CSR research and to push towards conceptual clarity. Finally, sport organisations can lever sports' unique qualities to deliver, engage and unite people across a range of boundaries, and to promote and create social value which is even more important as we navigate the post-COVID-19 environment of uncertainty and resource constraints.