Sport stadia are political objects that carry an environmental cost. The purpose of this research is to add to previous literature by theorizing the political process of stadium construction in a way that accounts for how environmental issues are introduced into the political process and, therefore, offers a more accurate lens through which to interpret how sustainable stadia are constructed. We conducted a case study of SC Freiburg’s carbon-neutral stadium construction process to theorize the object-oriented politics of sport facility construction. SC Freiburg is a German football club, playing in the Bundesliga. To examine the case, we employed a key informant interview and document analysis using Nexis Uni searches, local newspaper articles, official city documents, and social media websites. The case study of SC Freiburg’s carbon neutral stadium construction process showed that environmental concerns were included through a political process that incorporated the interests of a diverse public of human and nonhuman actors (while excluding some actors whose interests could not be reconciled) to produce a sustainable matter of fact. Additionally, we propose a pragmatic definition of stadium sustainability and suggest that environmental activists should make sure that both human and nonhuman actors with sustainability concerns are included in the stadium’s material public.

Immigration is transforming the United States and cultural diversity is becoming increasingly visible within an emerging poly-ethnic society. Such a challenge to the singularity of cultural assimilation is having policy implications at multiple levels. For municipal parks and recreation departments, this cultural shift presents an extra dimension to the local government role of providing facilities that meet the needs of residents. This paper presents the case study of Church Street Park in Morrisville, North Carolina, which is the site of the first purpose-built cricket facility in the Research Triangle area. Furthermore, this paper argues that a Marshallian framework, albeit in re-conceptualized terms, can elicit the objective and subjective domains of citizenship as constructed through sport participation. Specifically, the development of the cricket field fosters a mono-ethnic and diasporic identity as well as a rich sense of belonging among the growing resident South Asian immigrant population.

In many ways, intercollegiate athletics represents the ‘sustainable’ front porch of higher education. The high-visibility, high-impact nature of elite-level college athletics make athletic departments a central player in the sustainable development journey. However, not all athletic departments respond to this responsibility, nor are all responses uniformly successful. According to national reporting frameworks, an increasing number of universities in the United States are choosing to involve their athletic departments in university-level sustainability governance structures, but the benefits and limitations of this remain unclear. Using the theory of loosely coupled systems, and more specifically, the voice of compensations (which views loose coupling as an unsatisfactory state), the purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of athletic department engagement in shared sustainability governance, and, thus, a whole-of-institution approach. Semi-structured interviews with sustainability office personnel were conducted and analyzed, and the findings imply that shared sustainability governance has the potential to focus the attention of athletic departments toward sustainability, as well as to reaffirm shared values. Yet, to maximize the impact of athletic departments toward the sustainable development goals of a university, sustainability office personnel suggest the deployment of additional change levers, in a multi-dimensional fashion, as supplementary coupling mechanisms. These would include more rigorous sustainability goals (top-down), continued collaboration on ‘low-hanging fruit’ initiatives (lateral), student-athlete engagement (bottom-up), and the development of an internal sustainability framework (inside-out).

Netball emerged in Jamaica in 1909 through a disjointed education system that was heavily influenced by British Crown Colony Rule. As such, the first avid netballers on the island were the tiny minority of young women who were afforded a high school education. It was not until the establishment of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1923 that netball began to develop beyond this exclusionary emergence. Specifically, behind a movement that sought to include all classes and races of young Jamaican women in intellectual and recreational activities, the YWCA quickly established netball as a central part of the services offered to members. Officials of the Kingston YWCA, the home and headquarters of the movement nationally, acted as ambassadors for netball by advocating its establishment in schools and other community settings. Ultimately, the YWCA’s impetus led to the establishment of one of the first competitive netball leagues in Jamaica in 1935 – the Kingston and St Andrew Net Ball League. This narrative history provides the foundations from which to further understand and appreciate how netball has become one of the most popular sports for Jamaican women in contemporary times.

This study examines the development of Nassau County International Cricket Stadium, a temporary modular venue constructed for the 2024 International Cricket Council Men's T20 World Cup in New York. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and a Project Life Cycle framework, the study analyzes how institutions and power shaped the ways heterogeneous actors negotiated stadium development. Using primary and secondary sources, we trace how the roles of the International Cricket Council, Cricket West Indies, the US local organizing committee, Nassau County officials, community groups, environmental regulations, and material technologies impacted project development. Results reveal how project feasibility was socio-materially and politically produced. The International Cricket Council's commercial goals, leadership over the US organizing committee, demands of the Indian mediascape, and local political and regulatory landscapes influenced the project's development, while simultaneously constraining and halting alternative proposals. Our results question the political neutrality of the Project Life Cycle, whereby accelerated mega-event timelines privileged global sport priorities and marginalized community members and environmental regulations. This research demonstrates that the building of temporary sport stadia is not merely a technical project management exercise; rather, it is a negotiated and unequal process by which global sport priorities, project timelines, and institutional power determine whose interests shape facility development and the longer-term local impacts.