The politics of Sport NZ’s financial bailouts

ABSTRACT

On 17th May 2020, the New Zealand Government announced a $265 million investment to support sport and recreation amid the country’s first COVID-19 lockdown. The Sport NZ Recovery Package (RP) focused on three investment outcomes for the sector: ‘Reset and Rebuild’, ‘Strengthen and Adapt’, and [become] ‘Different and Better’ (Sport NZ 2020a). This study examines the overall design features and funding initiatives of the RP as a novel policy response to ‘turbulence’. Of particular interest is whether this instrument was ‘system changing’ (McDonnell and Elmore 1987) and how it might enable future transformation or stability in the sports sector. Drawing from documents and interviews with officials from Sport NZ, one National Sports Organisation (NSO), and six Regional Sports Trusts (RSTs), three key findings relate to 1) the characteristics of the RP as policy instrument; 2) the novelty of Tū Manawa relative to Sport NZ’s shifting strategy; and 3) the way in which organisations coped with the administration of new funds. The findings suggest that Sport NZ’s funding strategies were multidimensional (targeting a wider array of activities and organisations than those pre-COVID-19) and could themselves be ‘turbulent-inducing’. Future studies should examine the long-term legacy of the package and its associated goals to interpret if Sport NZ’s initiatives are sustained for the [promised] readjustment and strengthening of the New Zealand sports sector.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• sport policy
• New Zealand
• turbulence
• policy instruments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Univeristy of Otago.