Sp Soc Int J Ph Ed Sp 2016 - Volume 16 – Special Issue 102 GLOBAL GOALS: YOUTH AND SPORT Sebahattin DEVECIOGLU 1 , Güner EKENCI 2 , Mustafa YILDIZ 3 1 Firat University, Faculty of Sport Science, 23119,Elazig Turkey, +90 5323416283, sdevecioglu@firat.edu.tr 2 İstanbul Gelişim University, Department of Sport Management, Avcılar / İstanbul/Turkey, +90 212 422 70 00, gekenci@gelisim.edu.tr 3 Akdeniz University, Department of Recreation, Antalya/Turkey, +902423106814, tr.mustafayildiz@gmail.com Abstract. The 2030 Agenda comprises 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, which will guide policy and funding for the next 15 years, beginning with a historic pledge to end poverty. Everywhere. Permanently. The concept of the SDGs was born at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20, in 2012. The objective was to produce a set of universally applicable goals that balances the three dimensions of sustainable development: environmental, social, and economic. The Global Goals replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which in September 2000 rallied the world around a common 15-year agenda to tackle the indignity of poverty. The MDGs established measurable, universally-agreed objectives for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, preventing deadly but treatable disease, and expanding educational opportunities to all children, among other development imperatives. Today there are more than one billion youth in the world. In the developing world, half of the population is below the age of 21 and most of them face extreme poverty in this context the UN General Council declared 12 August as International Youth Day on 17 December 1999 so that the “World Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and Beyond” that was prepared to comba t these problems and to make communities more conscious of these problems can be convened every year on a specific date. Youth who come together every year since 2000 in the context of these delegations discuss social, economic, cultural issues and issues related to human development and publish declarations. The sport sector, which gathers millions of people, practitioners, and professionals from all ages across the five continents, has contributed significantly to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and is looking forward to accelerating its efforts in within the post-2015 Development Agenda. In this study Global Goals or Sustainable Development Goals and the Millennium Development Goals will be assessed in terms of youth and sports activities. Keywords: Youth, Sport, Global Goals, Millennium Introduction The term globalisation itself has been poorly defined, often meaning different things to different people. In particular it is often unclear whether people are dealing with globalisation in all its forms or whether they are referring to economic or political or cultural or all three aspects of it. Globalisation is the process by which interaction between humans, and the effect of that interaction, occurs across global distances with increasing regularity, intensity and speed. Much of the debate about globalisation gives the impression that the process is relatively new and yet most analysts tend to agree that globalisation has in fact been underway for centuries. Globalisation is not a new phenomenon. The process of globalisation has been ongoing throughout human history but the rate of progress and effects of certain actions have accelerated and decreased the process at various periods in its development. Critics of globalisation insist that the process and development of global sport has neither been created completely, nor has it produced a world that may be defined by rampant free markets or passive nation-states. Some have suggested that although the global era may not have been completely created, it has come to an end as the more local, fundamental and international forces such as the United Nations or religious fundamentalist groups increasingly assert their influence in the early part of the twenty-first century. Trends towards greater global sporting interaction have, in fact, ebbed and flowed quite radically as they have developed alongside the rise of local, national and continental interaction and power [2]. Modern sport is bound up in a global network of interdependency chains that are marked by global flows and uneven power relations. The global flows that pattern world sport have several dimensions. These include: the international movement of people such as tourists, migrants, exiles and guest workers; the technology dimension is created by the flow between countries of the machinery and equipment produced by corporations and government agencies; the economic dimension centres on the rapid flow of money and its equivalents around the world; the media dimension entails the flow of images and information between countries that is produced and distributed by newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, video, satellite, cable and the world wide web; and finally, the ideological dimension is linked to the flow of values centrally associated with state or counterstate ideologies and movements. All five dimensions can be detected in late twentieth century sports development. Thus the global migration of sports personnel has been a pronounced