Be a Sport! Enhancing Systems Change of the Finnish Sport Policy

Be a Sport! Enhancing Systems Change of the Finnish Sport Policy

Be a Sport -project examines the Finnish public sport policy, its practices and the future needs for change in the framework of systemic thinking. The aim is to identify those structural, relational and transformative factors of public sport policy and practices which hinder or catalyze the actualization of the systems change.

The need for new interpretations and perspectives for sport policy are manifested for example by the European Union where sport was recognized to be a fast-moving policy area: the importance of sport is not only for the obvious health and wellbeing reasons, but also for a number of key areas such as social cohesion, innovation and research, territorial regeneration, economic growth or tackling climate change. The current situation around sport seems to be paradoxical and complex: at the same time when sport strives to adapt to societal change, it can also be the solution.

The Be a Sport -project will extend for example the understanding of policy mechanism, third sector practices, power relations, societal cohesion, effective governance, management and networks. These all are the basis for effective public sport policy. The project will also produce new concepts and ways to interpret sports policy as a complex systemic entity, which is a prerequisite for the strategic management of public sports policy. The project is supporting knowledge-based management by giving detailed and large sport policy analysis for actors who are responsible for sport policy decision-making, resource allocation and implementation of sport policy.

The scientific contribution lies in examining the complexity and systems change of sports policy empirically, utilizing multi-methodological approaches. As data we use policy documents, two kinds of social network data (archival based and interview-based snowball sampling), individual and focus group interviews.  The coordinator and leader of the Be a Sport -project is Jamk University of Applied Sciences. The University of Vaasa is involved in implementation.


Contact details:

Kati Lehtonen
Principal researcher, Title of Docent (sport management and governance)
Jamk University of Applied Sciences, Likes
[email protected]


Funding: Funding for sport science research projects from Ministry of Education, Science and Culture

Decision: OKM/35/626/2023

Other partners: High-performance Institute Kihu, Umeå University, Innland University of Applied Sciences