The Evolution of Disability Sport Policy in Hong Kong: From Welfare to Rights?

This article examines the evolution of disability sport policy in Hong Kong, interrogating how a policy domain rooted in colonial rehabilitation medicine has been reshaped by rights discourse and elite performance imperatives. Drawing on a qualitative documentary analysis of policy texts, strategic plans, and official reports spanning five decades, and guided by an integrated framework combining the social model of disability and the capability approach, the analysis traces a nonlinear trajectory across four phases, showing how policy logics have accumulated rather than replaced one another over time. While policy discourse has progressively incorporated rights-based language and global norms, implementation reveals persistent and constitutive tensions among welfare legacies, performance-driven investment, and the technical framing of barrier removal. The resulting hybrid model has expanded capabilities for elite athletes but faces enduring challenges in achieving universal participation. This uneven distribution of capability expansion represents not a transitional phase on the path to full inclusion but a stable governance settlement, in which elite performance operates as a substitute for systemic barrier removal, while simultaneously diverting attention from its absence. The Hong Kong case illuminates broader dilemmas in translating global inclusion norms into local welfare settlements, demonstrating that the strategic absorption of rights discourse into performance-oriented governance can produce a hierarchical inclusion that elevates the visibility of disability without necessarily transforming the structural conditions of marginalization. The article thus contributes to international debates on disability sport policy by revealing the conditions under which elite success and systemic exclusion can coexist.