Exploring the increasing interdependence of community sport and health policy in England

ABSTRACT

Governments in many countries are increasingly interested in using community sport as a vehicle for improving public health through physical activity (PA) promotion. This has been associated with an increasing interdependence between the community sport and health policy sectors. However, there are no empirically grounded studies which have examined this directly and systematically in England. By examining Sport England’s Get Healthy, Get Active (GHGA) initiative, this paper presents novel evidence derived from interviews held with strategic policy-makers from Sport England and a professional football charity (Everton in the Community), and 67 men who engaged in one of the GHGA funded programmes, Active Blues. The findings reveal how the increasing interdependence between community sport and health policy has been characterised by tightly contested and congested relations of power at local and national levels. Although Sport England was the lead organisation which coordinated and was accountable for community sport, it was nevertheless highly dependent on organisations outside of the sector, including health organisations, to deliver their community sport goals. This was indicative of the relatively vulnerable and marginal position which Sport England, and sport policy, occupied in the policy landscape and the associated generalisation of interests from sport to public health. The policy spillover from more powerful policy sectors such as health, to comparatively less powerful ones like community sport, raises questions about the degree to which government can realistically expect to achieve their formal community sport and health policy goals.

KEYWORDS:

• community sport
• figurational sociology
• partnerships
• physical activity
• policy spillover
• public health

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the two reviewers for their very helpful comments on the original version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although we are unable to explore this in more detail here, an additional feature of any sociological account of the increasing interdependence of sport and health policy sectors necessarily involves locating these interdependent relations in the context of wider social processes. Central among these are the medicalisation of life and sport, and contemporary neoliberal approaches to surveillance medicine and public health policy and programming which privilege and value highly individualised forms of self-care and health management, and often downplay the significance of structural inequalities (see Malcolm 2017, Gibson and Malcolm 2020).

Additional information

Funding

We wish to acknowledge funding received by Sport England from the second round of GHGA to support the evaluation of Active Blues