In the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, the political landscape has created opportunities for mining, oil, and gas ('extractives') industries to 'replace' some of the federal and territorial governments' provision of social programmes. With the 'boom' or 'bust' uncertainty of the resource economy in Canada, questions arise concerning the long-term stability of extractives industry-funded provision of services, including sport for development (SFD) initiatives. In this study of SFD in the NWT, we use a Foucauldian approach to examine historical and present-day discourses to identify the conditions of possibilitythat is, those conditions that have facilitated an apparent need and funding for SFD in the NWT. The format of our paper is as follows: First, we provide an overview of Foucauldian theory and our methodology, archaeology. Through an archaeological examination of discourse related to sport and the NWT, we argue that there are four conditions of possibility that have created the need for SFD in the NWT: the history of settlement, the rise of SFD, corporate social responsibility, and NWT socioeconomic agreements signed at the territorial and community levels. We conclude this paper by raising important implications that these conditions may have for sport and the provision of services and social and political issues in the NWT.

We employed postcolonial theory, a case study methodology, and critical discourse analysis to investigate the ways in which non-First Nations and First Nations news sources produced understandings of the role(s) that education policies may have played in the deaths of seven First Nations students in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. We found that national non-First Nations media sources produced the discourse that First Nations peoples require federal government policy as a form of intervention in their lives. Further, we found that though these media sources focused on criticizing the present state of First Nations education, they ignored the colonial processes and policies that contributed to a situation that resulted in the students attending high school in Thunder Bay, rather than their home communities. First Nations and local (Thunder Bay) non-First Nations media sources, however, emphasized the need for greater cooperation between the Canadian government and First Nations peoples to resolve the long-standing policy issues that continue to affect First Nations youth and their education in northern Ontario. These findings point to important differences in the ways in which various forms of media cover First Nations policy issues.

In this study, we employ Bacchi’s (2012) “What’s the Problem Represented to be” approach to guide our discourse analysis of federal Indigenous sport for development (SFD) policies in Canada and Australia.  Through a review of government policies and reports, we highlight the often-divergent policy directives set out by federal departments in these two countries.  Namely, inter-departmental partnerships in areas such as health, education, and justice fail to be adequately facilitated through SFD policies in Canada, while, conversely, Australia has strived towards greater federal partnership building.  Within the identified Canadian and Australian policies, both countries consistently produced sport as having the potential to contribute to Indigenous peoples’ social and economic development, thus highlighting the growing institutional support behind Indigenous SFD.  This policy analysis research provides a novel contribution to the overall growing body of literature investigating the politics of partnership building in SFD initiatives.