Bouncing Back and Jumping Forward: Scoping the Resilience Landscape of International Sports Events and Implications for Events and Festivals.

Abstract

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to critically scope the resilience landscape to help better understand how future studies on international sports events and venues could be informed by existing work in disaster management and resilience studies. The paper suggests that within the differing benchmarks currently used to define and classify major international sports events, at present crises and disaster management considerations are largely ignored or underestimated. The paper reviews previous research in crisis and disaster management, highlighting the potential for closer synergies between both sport and events studies and crisis and disaster management fields. It contributes new knowledge through the introduction of an International Sports Events resilience continuum to assist with better understanding resilience. The broader implications for events and festivals are highlighted. While the interdisciplinary study of crisis, disasters and emergency management has become increasingly sophisticated, the identification of synergies and useful concepts in relation to both sport and events studies to inform these areas is still at an early stage of development. This paper adds to the limited body of knowledge on sports events resilience, and in doing so highlights potential avenues for future research in both sport and events, in terms of both theory and practice.