Speaker
Description
This paper aims to provide an account of the evolution of Korean para sport athletes’ development strategy, which was created based on the benchmarking of non-para athletes’ development policy. The first year of the research was devoted to the collection of practices from other counties, such as Canada, Japan, USA, UK and Australia; that is, mainly the countries the KPC considered developed and well organized with regards to para sports, and particularly in terms of Para Sport Science. The second year of the research moved on to explore what policy agendas local para sport committees and national federations requested, and discuss how to plan them. The method for this research was mainly interviews with local directors and managers of para sport committees and the observation of the official meetings of KPC Task Force who are actual stakeholders in this whole policy planning and implementation process. In the third year, the activities mainly involved research consultation for the planning of the actual policy project, based on the outcomes of the three-year research.
The paper draws on a constructivist theoretical frame to analyse the decision-making process leading to the National Para Athletes’ Development Policy and the inter-communication of the policy to the local governments local Para Sport Committees and NFs. One of the key findings of the research is that the dominant tendency of benchmarking non-para elite athletes' policy is hard to change, due to the existing power structure, even though most of the stakeholders involved agreed on the rationales.
