French sports policies for young people : fragmentation and coordination modes

International audienceFrench sports policies are characterized by hefty state controls inherited from the Gaullist era. Decentralization laws enacted from 1982 onwards defined the competences of the different institutions on the diverse levels of an administrative area, thus relieving the State of some of its functions. Therefore, sports policies for young people are numerous due to the amount of people involved at various levels of public action (national, regional, local) and because several regulating bodies are implicated (the Ministries of Sport, Education and Justice), but also due to the difficulty in articulating public and private initiatives. The aim of this paper is to bring to light, through concrete examples, the problems caused by this multi-management of sport for young people in France, but also to show the original coordination modes deriving from this situation with reference to specific projects that have sometimes required complete rethinking. This process, initiated some 30 years ago, revealed a number of dead-ends incompatible with the efficiency expected from public policies. The present context of crisis and economic austerity crystallizes the faults that ought to be corrected by a better management of youth sports policy. We shall use three examples to demonstrate how the fundamental challenges of public action crisscross, within the State, between ministries, local authorities and the sports movement in particular