Sport for Development (SFD) in South Korea: An Analysis of Process of Sport Policy Change and Evaluation of SFD Programmes

  • Park, Jongchul (Project manager)

Project details

Research objective

In recent years, sport is considered as a practical vehicle to deal with social, cultural, and economic issues around the world. In particular, diverse sport programmes have been emerged to achieve the initiatives created by the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. These initiatives are commonly called Sport for Development (SFD) programme or movement.

SFD programmes are concerned with sport participation, gender, socialisation, and education issues, and are directly related to children, women, disabled, and disadvantaged people. The implement of SFD is generally practiced by global North toward the global South, but several developing nations have recently implemented SFD programmes. This means that implementing SFD actions to promote social change is considered as a global trend around the world.

South Korea has become a sports power in the world with the help of huge investment in elite athlete development system and successful holding mega event such as the 1988 Olympic Games and the 2002 FIFA World Cup. In addition, South Korea is a country of the unique example whose status has changed from an aid-recipient country to a donor country. As a result, Korean government has been trying to have interest in international outreach and cooperation through sports programmes. For instance, Dream Together programme and Dream programme have been implemented as a part of SFD action in South Korea.

Despite increasing interests in SFD programmes, however, Korean sport policy in relation to SFD programmes tends to be political and short-termism for hosting mega event. Also, there has been little research for analysing change process of sport policy on SFD movement in South Korea compared to research, such as school sport, elite sport, and sport for all. In addition, the absence of scientific evidence of how sport activities contribute to dealing with social issues still indicates a significant gap between theory and practice.

Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to explore the change process of sport policy in South Korea in relation to Sport for Development (SFD). In addition, the thesis aims to evaluate and analyse Korean SFD programmes on the basis of Sport for Development Theory (SFDT), and then identify distinctive features of Korean SFD compared to international current SFD movement. Lastly, the thesis will pursue to suggest direction of improvement regarding SFD in South Korea.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date01.06.16 → …