Brighton Declaration

Development of the Brighton Declaration

In 1994, the first World Conference on Women and Sport—aimed at policy and decision makers in sport—was held in Brighton, England. It was organized and hosted by the British Sports Council and supported by the International Olympic Committee. The aim of the conference was to address the issue of how to accelerate the process of change so as to redress the imbalances women faced in their involvement in sport. The conference was attended by 280 delegates from 82 countries representing governmental and non-governmental organizations, national Olympic Committees, international and national sport federations, and educational and research institutions.

The conference agenda embraced a range of issues including culture, gender, disability, and sexuality along with discussions on leadership, the management of change, marketing, mentoring, and networking. A major outcome of the conference was the Brighton Declaration that conference organizers believed could be used as a way of raising awareness of gender issues in sport and gaining the commitment of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to work toward gender equity in sport.

The process of developing the Brighton Declaration was organized to facilitate input from conference delegates through feedback from workshops, collective discussion of a draft declaration and individual submissions to a drafting group. An initial draft was developed by Sue Baker-Finch of the Australian Sports Commission before the conference, and she was then joined by Julia Bracewell and John Scott of the British Sports Council and the Honourable Pendukeni Ivula-Ithana, Minister of Youth and Sport from Namibia, on the drafting group, which worked through the conference. Revisions and amendments were made to align the document with other international women's rights and human rights agendas as well as to include issues and concerns of conference delegates from all parts of the world. This small drafting group demonstrated leadership in the way they worked to gain input and ownership to the document from conference delegates. The four members of the group brought different skills and types of experience to the table. Sue Baker-Finch had considerable experience of women and sport policy development in Australia, Julia Bracewell was a former international fencer and a practicing lawyer, John Scott had significant experience of international relations in sport, and Pendukeni Ivula-Ithana had knowledge of the struggle for human rights in Africa and the workings of the United Nations. A final draft was distributed to delegates on the last day and unanimously endorsed.

Though the group was responsible for the development of the document at the conference, the decision to stage the conference that provided the context for the Brighton Declaration's development is important. The British Sports Council (a governmental organization) was the instigator and organizer of the conference. It was active not only in developing national sports policy and programs but also in international sports policy (for example antidoping), and it had strong links with both European and Commonwealth networks. In the early 1990s, it had provided leadership of the European Women and Sport Working group through Margaret Talbot, and this group had already embarked on a series of biannual conferences in Europe. By enlisting the support of its Commonwealth networks, the Sports Council was able to widen the conference to make it a world event. Its partner sports councils in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were all leading organizations in the [Page 119]women and sport field, having developed national policies and programs to combat gender inequality in sport. Their experience, together with that of the Europeans, particularly the Scandinavian countries, provided the expert resource base needed to initiate the international women and sport movement at the Brighton Conference. The success of the conference was due to the vision and determination of a number of influential women leaders in Europe and the Commonwealth backed by organizations that had the power, networks, human, and financial resources to stage a successful conference. Women provided the necessary leadership—working collectively (though not without some conflict) and being supported by men in powerful institutional positions who respected the ideology of their work and recognized the need for the sports world to address gender issues.

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