ABSTRACT
At the same time as sports are indeed important and popular in most countries around the world, the extent to which sports are politicised and how sports policies are organised or institutionalised varies considerably. In the Western world, there are, for example, signifi cant differences between the extent to which public sector, market actors and/or civil society organisations matter for important questions regarding the generation of resources for sports, the kind of facilities that are built and how they are maintained and, following from that, who participates and which sports are popular (Bergsgard et al., 2007; Chalip, Johnson, & Stachura, 1996; Heinemann, 1999; Houlihan, 1997). As examples, we fi nd U.S. sports where, to a large extent, educational institutions are central and national sport policies are rather restricted. France is an example of a model where sport is very much a public responsibility. Finally, there are Northern-European traditions where sports are, to a large extent, organised in voluntary organisations in tandem with relatively ambitious, yet also decentralised, public policies (Bergsgard & Nordberg, 2010; Ibsen & Seippel, 2010). The purpose of this article is to study in more detail how this third type of sport policy system with both considerable public and civil society involvements is organised and, especially, what kind of consequences this specifi c form of organisation has for how this type of system functions. I will use the case of Norway as my example.
