Chapter 7: Sport for Development: Learning from Cultural Psychology to Catalyze Community Development

Sport for development (SfD) and sport for development and peace (SDP) is despite the field’s relatively young age in risk of rejection due to the lack of empirical backings. The field is born into a neoliberal outcome-oriented epistemological era especially due to the reliance upon fundraising based upon the need to show value for money and clear and obvious transferable results in politicized organizations. However, as you will see in this chapter, this approach to understanding and studying the potentials of SfD blocks the opportunity of understanding the process of change following participation in SfD programs. By learning from cultural psychology, it will be highlighted how the ontological assumption about social change prevalent in the field needs revision in order to understand the potential process of intrapsychological change in the intuitive meaning making processes of participants in SfD programs. This is pursued by bringing in the ideas of semiotic mediation and participative opportunities from a critical cultural psychological approach to meaning making and changes in this process. Further, I will call for an epistemological discussion of how to methodologically approach the study of SfD programs in order to study the potentials in the field instead of an immature rejection of the field. Further, I discuss how SfD programs might open for community development due to the inherent reciprocity in meaning making process following a Lewinian approach to human and community development.