From participation and performance to impact and intentionality: a socially conscious future for sport

Since its establishment in the nineteenth century, sport-for-development has grown exponentially. By exploring Scottish basketball, a system that now embraces social impact alongside participation and performance objectives, this qualitative analysis uses secondary materials (audio-visuals and documents) to demonstrate how sporting ecosystems are contemporarily evolving towards more socially conscious futures by espousing and practicing sport-for-development principles. The findings reflect an important shift in the sector—moving beyond short-term sport programmes towards sustainable systems embedding SFD thinking within communities, institutions, and development frameworks. They also highlight failures within the system, with progress being driven by community organisations that embrace social innovation to survive. Overall, the research proposes that, in contexts where participation and performance goals are not being achieved, organisations may be better positioned to serve their people and communities of interest by using sport to help improve their quality-of-life beyond sport itself. One key change involves moving from transactional to transformational relationships with people.