This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the attempts of cities to host sporting "megaevents" like the Olympics and football World Cups. In the past 20 years, as megaevents have become larger and more cities have begun to bid to host them, bidding has emerged as a significant component of global urban policymaking. Bidding to host megaevents entails large commitments of public funds (more than $570 billion total in 2011 and 2012) and sweeping policy changes to accommodate event planning and build public-private governance partnerships. Megaevent bidding now involves a host of "development" objectives that stakeholders promise to deliver. Megaevents planners historically limited their objectives to urban-scale development projects, but more recently they have claimed that megaevents can deliver transnational development outcomes like national poverty reduction, tourism development that will aid the poor, climate change mitigation, or national sustainability planning. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine why more ambitious bidding has become both possible and necessary to win a contract to host a megaevent. The doctoral student will pursue answers to the following questions: (1) Why have megaevent bidding practices become more ambitious? (2) How do policymakers, non-governmental organizations, and firms transfer and apply bidding practices between different cities? (3) What is the effect of these evolving bidding practices on the composition of stakeholders involved in development planning? To answer these questions, he will use archival materials and expert interviews to compare bids to host Olympics and football World Cups, which are the largest megaevents. He will analyze 100 such bids dating from 1991 to 2013 that sought to host events held between 2000 and 2020. The student will trace the international and historical connections in the cities' bids, including changes in the types of development and planning policy objectives pursued by bid stakeholders; funding, contracting, and knowledge sharing between cities; and the ways in which new types of bids build new types of urban-national-transnational partnerships.
Despite the large body of scholarship on megaevents, public conversations about their impacts often have been stymied by the contradictory research findings of dueling experts and their respective backers. Potential megaevent host communities need consistent, comparative information about the opportunities and challenges that cities encounter when promising planning outcomes in a bid. This project will generate comparative, transnational information and insights about the stakeholders who participate in megaevent bidding, how their policies are transferred between cities, and their role in promising "development" through megaevent planning. This information will inform citizens, policymakers, and scholars in potential megaevent hosting cities and in international event planning organizations. The study will enhance infrastructure for research and education by collaborating with megaevents research centers in the United States and Switzerland. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this project will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.
