Grassroots Development Index

This book provides a systematic overview of football development from a scientific perspective. The proposed multidimensional framework of assessing the concept of sports development (with a deliberate emphasis on association football) goes beyond the conventional medal tally counts and win percentages. The conceptual foundation of the Football Development Index (FDI) revolves around the understanding that football development grasps all athletic proficiency levels from grassroots to elite, and includes all football stakeholders. The proposed composite indicator of football development highlights three key dimensions: on-pitch performance, popularity, and development environment. The book provides both a conceptual discussion on football development as well as an overview of the various techniques used for constructing composite indicators. The practical implications of a multidimensional index on football development cover a vast array of fundamental sports economics and management issues such as performance measurement and management, fairness of funding allocation, sports development policy, stakeholder relations, and many others. While providing concrete guidelines and recommendations, this book also raises some fundamental issues, such as whether socio-economic determinants can affect a nation's sporting performance. Results turn out to be inconclusive, but going further with this notion, the correlations between socio-economic development levels and football development seem to produce more insightful findings, which shed light on more questions than the book has the ability to answer. The findings of this research may be adopted by FIFA and continental and national federations to objectify decision-making regarding development programs and activities. This book embodies a systematic assessment approach, which can be adapted to fit the needs of any football governing body and which provides an opportunity to benchmark the best global football development practices. The research also contributes to the theoretic development of performance measurement systems in sports and to the widely discussed issue of direct and indirect determinants of football development.

Southeast Asia has long fascinated development practitioners and researchers for being one of the few regions of the world that has resisted global trends to become a successful developing region. Divided into accessible thematic chapters, this book adopts a unique perspective of equitable development to outline the strengths and weaknesses of the transformations taking place in the Southeast Asian region. Focusing on four key themes: equality and inequality; political freedom and opportunity; empowerment and participation; and environmental sustainability, these concepts are used to explore Southeast Asian development and trace the impacts that the growing popularity of market-led and grassroots approaches are having upon economic, political and social processes. Whilst the diversity of the region is emphasized so are some of the homogenizing trends such as the concentration of wealth and services in urban areas and the subsequent migration of rural people into urban factories and squatter settlements. The ongoing commercialization and industrialization of rural agriculture as well as the expansion of non-farm income earning opportunities in rural spaces, and the alarming rates of environmental degradation which threaten health and livelihoods are also exposed. In highlighting how Southeast Asian development is unevenly distributing wealth, opportunities and risks throughout the region, this book emphasizes the need for creative new approaches to ensure that benefits of development are equitably enjoyed by all. Including illustrations, case studies and further reading, this book provides an accessible up-to-date introductory text for students and researchers interested in Southeast Asian development, development studies, Asian studies and geography.