Researching ‘Sustainable Development in African Sport’: A case study of a North-South academic collaboration

Abstract

Academic literature on sport for development commonly identifies the dominance of those in the Global North over policy and practice in the field (Akindes and Kirwan, 2009; Hayhurst, 2009; Darnell, 2012) and yet, taken collectively, academic research in this field could well be subject to a similar critique. Research, and resultant academic publications, on sport for development have largely been undertaken by researchers working in universities in the Global North. Potentially as a result, much early sport for development research can be identified to have a focus on programmes and issues that are international in their orientation (Lindsey and Grattan, 2012). It is positive that this trend has begun to be countered recently with a greater number of publications exploring the local implementation of sport for development programmes (Guest, 2009; Whitley et al., 2012; Hasselgård and Straume, 2014) with some authored by researchers from the Global South (Banda, 2011; Njelesani, 2011), albeit often employed at Northern universities. Nevertheless, there are few, if any, published studies or accounts of sport for development research undertaken by North-South partnerships of researchers, although literature is available on such partnerships in medical and other areas development research (Binka, 2005; Jentsch and Pille, 2003). This chapter presents a case study of a research partnership undertaken across universities in the Global North and South. This partnership has been enabled by a grant of almost £100,000 from Leverhulme Trust, a charitable research funder from the UK, for a research project entitled “Sustainable Development in African Sport” led by Edge Hill University, UK, and involving the University of Ghana, the University for Development Studies, Ghana, the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Monash University, Australia. The authors of this chapter represent the lead partners for this project in each of these five universities. The research project commenced in October 2011 with the funding term for the project finishing in October 2014.