Exploring the opportunities and challenges for future service planning and delivery of sport and recreation infrastructure

Abstract

The planning of sport and recreation infrastructure in the Redland local government area (LGA) is becoming increasingly complex to design, plan, fund, manage, deliver and operate. This is due to a range of factors, including, for example, changing participation rates, the approaches to infrastructure standards of service, and availability of suitable land. Current planning and management approaches are not adequate to address this multifaceted complexity. This has implications for effective infrastructure decision-making, resulting in sub optimal outcomes for community use, environmental outcomes and economic opportunity in Redlands. Additionally, the desired to host events for South-East Queensland, 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games have added additional challenges for sport and recreation infrastructure in the Redland City Council. This research has worked in partnership with Redlands as a case study for the development of this research and Masters thesis project. This research has applied sociotechnical systems (STS) approaches to seek to improve the understanding of the complexity, explore why it is occurring and identify opportunities for system optimisation. STS methods have been well established and utilised over many decades across a range of health and safety critical research and practice domains such healthcare, transport, defence and manufacturing. While they have also been applied to explore complexity in urban systems and sport systems, this is the first time they have been utilised to analyse a sport and recreation infrastructure system. This thesis utilised four (4) distinct sociotechnical systems approaches, across four (4) studies in the application of a ‘many models’ approach to understand the challenges and opportunities for Redland City Council in the planning and delivery of sport and recreation infrastructure: 1. An Actor Map, based in risk management, to identify all the actors (stakeholders) in the system 2. A Work Domain Analysis, based in systems engineering, to identify the overall aims, measures, tasks and activities and required infrastructure and resources 3. A Social Organisation and Cooperation Analysis, which combined the outputs of Studies 1 & 2 to analyse which actors are responsible for the tasks and activities in the system 4. An Interventions & Leverage Analysis, which analysed the modelling outputs against three (3) case study system interventions, to establish practical recommendations for Council. More than 450 interacting and contributory human and non-human actors were identified and mapped in a first of its kind representation of sports and recreation infrastructure. These actors are established as all having a role to play within the system, across the six (6) levels of the abstraction hierarchy from international and global actors, through to sport facilities themselves. All actors are identified as contributing to the structure of the system, including its overall aims, performance measures, tasks and activities and required resources and infrastructure. The scale of the actors involved, and the complexity of the system allows for the identification of areas of system conflict and complementarity. The modelling also highlights areas where there are areas of high workload, as well as vulnerabilities within the system. The many models combination of sociotechnical systems methods allowed for the detailed analysis of three (3) areas of intervention and the establishment of areas of system leverage – where small changes can have the greatest impact. This analysis revealed that ‘how’ the system operates, via resources such as data, plans and policies, is more influential to system optimisation and success than the physical infrastructure itself. The understanding of system interactions, including performance measures to achieve success, provide new perspectives for Council’s approach to the infrastructure network. Ultimately, the research demonstrated the utility of sociotechnical systems approaches in providing an improved understanding of the challenges and complexity within this complex system. The results can support decision-making through practical recommendations that could be considered by the local government to improve sport and recreation infrastructure outcomes for the community. This research provided various theoretical, methodological and practical contributions, associated with the extension of the sociotechnical systems methods to the sport and recreation information domain, the utilisation of WDA prompt questions for the interventions and leverage analysis and the leverage points, or practical recommendations for Council.