Cultivating Safe Space: Lessons for Sport-for-Development Projects and Events

Recent research has examined how sports events and sport-for-development (SFD) projects can create, sustain, and maximize positive social impacts for local communities. This paper takes this debate forward by arguing that the cultivation of safe space is a key ingredient of SFD management and community event leverage. Safe space is conceptualized as a multidimensional process that involves physical, psychological/affective, sociocultural, political, and experimental dimensions. Drawing on empirical findings from Sri Lanka, Israel, and Brazil, the paper shows how these different dimensions of safe space operate and interact in practice, and identifies practical strategies that sport managers, policymakers, and practitioners can use to cultivate safe spaces in and through sports projects and events