ABSTRACT
Public organisations constitute a coherent network whose powers are established by law.3 The town and city councils, in accordance with the 1978 Spanish Constitution, are responsible for making sport accessible to the entire population. The state organisations have responsibilities of a general nature (planning of sport facilities, research programmes, overall coordination and so on) and of international representation. Their regional/autonomous4 counterparts are responsible for everything related to implementing policies within their jurisdiction. And both provide support for the programmes devised by the municipalities. The public sector as a whole occupies a position of hegemony in the sport system, as it does in other spheres of social life. This phenomenon may be explained in terms of the social-historical context of the country, which has been late to develop a civil society able to organise itself with the focus on meeting democratic, egalitarian objectives (Burriel and Puig 1999; Puig et al. forthcoming).
