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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government sport agencies maintain an enduring interest in National Sport Organisations (NSOs) and deploy a number of tools to make them more effective and efficient. Independent, consultant-led reviews are increasingly used to assess aspects of capability, sustainability, governance, management, and programme delivery. However, it is unknown how NSOs respond to these instruments and the latter's capacity to induce substantive change. This research investigates how and why NSOs respond to independent reviews of their organisations, whether purposefully, passively or politically. Drawing from documents and interviews with NSO officials, findings demonstrate that NSOs respond both purposefully and passively to recommendations advising centralised control over their networks. While there is evidence that responses to reviews invite further state involvement, the mix of responses, along with the finding that 'reviews beget reviews', suggests NSOs maintain considerable agency to 'muddle through' recommendations. This study speaks to why reviews may be repeated and why they may face increasing scepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governing state-funded sport is tenuous because of the need to maintain legitimacy and support from political authorisers, stakeholders and network partners/members. The purpose of this paper is to compare/contrast how central sport agencies in Norway and New Zealand create, build or sustain legitimacy through their accountability regimes. More particularly, this comparison distinguishes between input and output sources of legitimacy, where the former is associated with democratic processes (e.g., electoral procedures and public consultation), and the latter is linked with results and demonstrable benefits. While the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) draws legitimacy from its representative membership structures and status as a social movement, Sport New Zealand claims legitimacy on the basis of achieving targets and outputs. In both cases there are emerging pressures to recast input-output legitimating narratives, suggesting their 'depleteability' over time. These shifts are discussed in relation to their influence on policy reforms within environments of accountability that are fluid and incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date there has been little explicit theorization concerning the role of risk in global migration studies. Drawing upon Beck's concept of the 'risk society,' this paper presents an investigation of the interplay between societal risk and micro-level migration decision-making. Thick historical contextualization and interview data are used to examine the process of decision-making of South Koreans' migration to New Zealand. Four risk factors were found to contribute to their 'exit' decisions: South Korea's highly competitive, work-oriented society brought about by compressed modernity; North Korea's threat of war and the South's consequent political and military culture; the home nation's obsession with education and academic performance; and the difficulties of reconciling traditional collectivist values with upward mobility. It is argued that while elements of risk may be universal, they need to be understood within specific cultural contexts and in relation to how they influence peoples' lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has commonly been theorised as a process that ends with settlement in a new country and thus return visits have not been conceptualised as part of the migration experience. As has been noted in the literature, the return visit is a temporary visit to an individual’s place of birth (or the ‘external homeland’) from a current country of residence which may help immigrants to construct and negotiate a transnational identity between the new and old homes. This study focuses on how one government, South Korea, uses sport as a part of a wider strategy to encourage return visits in order to maintain cultural, economic and political connections with overseas citizens. More specifically, this paper examines the experiences of Korean immigrants living in New Zealand who return to Korea to participate in the annual National Sports Festival. Drawing upon document analysis, interviews and participant observation data, three different types of experiences emerged: (1) athletic experiences through the event itself; (2) nostalgic experiences from reconnecting with families and friends or enjoying forms of culture and entertainment difficult to access in the receiving country; and (3) political and economic experiences through interactions with politicians and business people which may contribute to mutual benefits between their old and new homes. Overall, the paper discusses the experience and implications of Koreans who represent New Zealand in an (inter)national sport and cultural festival and its influence on their transnational lives and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small states are broadly distinguished on economic, political and cultural grounds and more particularly in relation to their vulnerability and resilience. This paper examines how legitimations around a country’s small size can induce compromises to buttress particular sport policies. Drawing from the New Zealand context, it explores how domestic cooperation can be prompted by the discursive frames of smallness itself. It further suggests that New Zealand’s corresponding ambition to ‘punch above its weight’ has enabled policy transformations to make the sport system appear more legitimate but no less vulnerable. Because scale invites consolidation, targeting and rationing, central sport agencies in small states may have to paradoxically invoke strategies to break the very communal bonds that provide them with the ‘fertile’ conditions for growth and competitive advantage. The study of small states may help scholars and policy-makers to better understand the significance of ‘managed intimacy’ as a counterbalance to neoliberal doctrines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The performance measurement regimes instituted by central government sport agencies have both intended and unintended effects in relation to their network partners. The purpose of this article is to investigate the actions and interpretations of national sport organizations (NSOs) in relation to a performance regime. Drawing from data in New Zealand, two broad categories of institutional effects are identified and discussed. The first category of effects relates to the tendency for performance measurement and monitoring to reinforce the delineation/demarcation between elite and community sport due to the relative clarity of the former’s measures, and the institutionalization of ‘cream-skimming’ at national and sub-national levels. The second category of effects surrounds the apparent paradoxes and vulnerabilities of performance measurement that include the demand for indicators to ‘mushroom’ and the development of ‘gaming’ behaviours. This study highlights the tenuousness of performance measurement schemes as a feature of ‘good management’ as well as their ultimate contribution towards (or disruption of) ‘good policy’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies aiming to enhance sport participation and physical activity are prone to change and highly influenced by shifting government priorities and instruments. In 2009, the New Zealand Government and its agency Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) abolished programmes aimed at inducing general physical activity and in their place establishedKiwisport, an initiative to get more school-age children involved in organized sport. This study analyses the impact of these changes on regional sports trusts (RSTs), as regional implementers of national sport policy and theKiwisportinitiative. Based on a process of induction from available texts (interviews with chief executives of RSTs and both public/nonpublic documents), three emerging challenges are presented and discussed. The first concerns how RSTs can fulfil Kiwisport's promises of minimal bureaucracy in the light of the limited capacities of community organizations and increasing demands from SPARC for evaluation. The second surrounds the difficulty in reconciling Kiwisport's allowance for greater RST discretion/autonomy with the demands for integrated national–regional delivery. The third challenge is with regard to creating sustainable community initiatives under conditions of depleting resources and shifting policy priorities. Findings raise fundamental questions as to how and to what extent RSTs should realign their organizations to meet central government objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sport policies are underpinned by particular interpretive frameworks or paradigms. These paradigms shape: a) the construction of policy problems, b) the alternative approaches to resolving these problems and c) what is considered to be an acceptable government intervention. This article investigates how a policy paradigm shaped the findings and recommendations of New Zealand's Ministerial Taskforce on Sport, Fitness and Leisure. Using empirical data gathered from observations of the Taskforce's consultations, interviews with Taskforce members and a review of public submissions, it is argued that a paradigm (stressing rationalization and integration) served as the basis for recommendations to reduce the number of regional sports trusts, to centralize control over the sector and to coordinate the administration of sport. Two fundamental contradictions and paradoxes arising from this paradigm shift are discussed. The first notes the historical contingencies that gave rise to the problem of fragmented sport delivery structures, including govermnent's preference for contractual agreements and decentralized control. The second examines the appropriateness of centralizing powers given the inherent need for specialized (and autonomous) delivery mechanisms. This study's focus on paradigms helps to explain how policies can alter institutional relations and the lived world of actors with respect to their identities, opportunities and capacities to act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]