Sport Diplomacy and the Policy Legacy of Sport Mega-Events for Global South Hosts

Sport, and sport mega-events (e.g., Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup) have become powerful tools for socio-economic development. At the same time, they are increasingly contested due to their concomitant corruption allegations, escalating costs, and government spending debacles. Consequently, greater consideration is being given to achieving sustainable and positive legacies by governments and sport organizations alike. Nevertheless, there have been limited scholarly studies investigating legacy in the long-term (e.g., five years after the Games). Only a few legacies have been measured by sports and/or policy scholars. Moreover, most focus on legacy outcomes for stakeholders and not on the policies and structures that were changed. Regarding sport diplomacy, there is significant literature on how nations use sport mega-events to achieve soft power gains. This is an outward-facing objective of a hosting nation. In contrast, where there are discussions of domestic policy outputs of hosting such mega-events, these scholars largely focus on whether sport and politics should or should not mix and/or narrowly upon a singular concern like human rights. Our paper will articulate an expanded policy-specific understanding of sport diplomacy’s domestic or inward-looking impacts. Our focus is on sport mega-events hosted by Global South nations and in particular, the impact of transnational actors (such the International Olympic Committee or Federation Internationale de Football Association) upon domestic policy shifts. Our theoretical framework is drawn first from Calo, Moloney, and Swart (2023) on when transnational sport actors do or do not ‘puncture’ the state. This includes when NGOs and international organizations promote policy shifts, when international sport associations encourage policy change, when domestic sport associations interact with domestic policies, and when domestic sport associations opt-out of policy-specific discussions. The second theoretical frame arises from Preuss’ (2019) event legacy framework on sport legacy-specific structural changes. We suggest that sport diplomacy is not exclusively an outward-facing exercise of hosting nations but also, it is integral to the outward diplomacy of transnational sport actors and separately, the ‘internal diplomacy’ of hosting nations as they discuss and implement policy shifts.