Reimagining elite sport through the lens of degrowth

Abstract

Research Question This article examines how degrowth could inform a rethinking of elite sport amid environmental and social crises. It argues that dominant sustainability approaches in elite sport remain constrained by green-growth assumptions and therefore struggle to confront ecological limits and inequality, and explores elite sport through a degrowth lens. Research Method Drawing on ecological economics, sustainability studies, sport governance, and critical pedagogy, the article develops a theoretical–conceptual synthesis that interrogates growth-oriented assumptions in elite sport and conceptualises degrowth as an alternative sustainability paradigm. Results and Findings The article develops an analytical framework structured around five interrelated domains (i.e. energy and environment, governance and geopolitics, production and consumption, inequality, and culture and education). This framework functions as a set of heuristic lenses that reveal how dominant green growth strategies, weak sustainability approaches, and technological fixes reproduce structural contradictions in elite sport. Through this lens, we illustrate alternative ways of thinking about scale, governance, resource use, equality, and meaning in elite sport. Implications This article contributes to emerging debates on degrowth in elite sport by moving the analytical focus from optimisation and efficiency to scale, sufficiency, limits, justice, and legitimacy. It provides a conceptual foundation for future empirical research on the political, institutional and social conditions under which degrowth-oriented transformations in elite sport may emerge and invites scholars to reconsider growth as an organising principle of sustainability in sports.