Translating impacts into development: what pointers from scholarship?

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Translating impacts into development what
pointers from scholarship?
Scarlett Cornelissen University of Stellenbosch
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The significance of sport mega-events in the
contemporary era
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The impacts of sport mega-events

• Well established discourse of potential
  short-term long-term gains, and increasingly
  costs
• Deliberate science of over- or mis-estimation
  by boosterists and naysayers alike
• Despite a vibrant and evolving scholarship on
  impacts legacies no cogent hypothesis of how
  impacts translate into development
• Discourse still privileges hard over soft
  infrastructure
• In fact events pose major challenges to
  conventional development theory
• large-scale
• sectorally focused
• concentrated

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The impacts of sport mega-events

• the high concentration implied by the Games in
  terms of time (a two-week event), space (one host
  city only, or even specific areas within the
  city) and investment (the operating and
  infrastructure costs of the Games are in
  billions) seems to conflict with the concept of
  sustainable development, that calls for the
  distribution and sharing of environmental, social
  and economic impacts across time and space for
  spreading benefits and minimising negative
  effects on the whole society
• (Frey et al, 20072)

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Translating impacts into development

• Clear understanding differentiation between
  direct, indirect induced impacts
• different sectors differentially affected
• Tourism impacts time lag before effects
  discernible
• although common failure to adequately profile
  event tourist
• sport tourist has different features
• Strategic targeting of resources given nature of
  local host economy
• incremental approach to sport event hosting
• second and third-tier rather than first
• gradually build up

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FIFA 2010 Planning processes legacies

• Terrain of planning in SA shaped by four major
  forces
• initial goals and proposals set out in Bid
  document
• FIFA preferences
• incorporation by government of 2010 planning
  into macro-economic objectives (incl. Asgisa)
• centring of provincial and urban policies around
  2010 infrastructure developments and gearing of
  resources to tournament
• however, rather process of retro-fitting
  established plans policies

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Legacies?

• Impacts of current infrastructural developments
  on future urban policy and planning
• Sectoral developments tourism, sport or more
  durable sport-tourism and event-tourism sectors?
• Football development at grassroots level?
• Unsystematic focus up to this point on soft
  infrastructure legacies
• Tourism shape impacts of FIFA tour operator
  programme