Urban governance and public leisure policies: a comparative analysis framework

Abstract

In the last few decades, the literature on leisure policies has evolved, thanks to a better understanding of the effects and impacts of public leisure actions rather than a comprehensive study of that field's public policy process. This has resulted in the development of a corpus focused on knowledge for policies rather than knowledge of policies, particularly in the study of urban governance and of the co-production of services with the non-profit and private sectors. The purpose of this article is to further explore the theoretical and conceptual implications of urban governance applied to the analysis of public leisure policies. It also aims to draw inspiration from the main approaches of urban policy analysis in order to propose an analytical framework applicable to an empirical process for comparative analysis mainly focused on describing the dynamics of local governance. The main purpose of this framework is to analyse the actors, governance mechanisms and factors that characterise the development of local leisure policies while giving special consideration to the collaborative nature of the relationships within this coalition of partners.

Keywords:

• leisure policies
• local government
• parks and recreation departments
• urban governance
• governing coalition

Notes

1. This lack of comparative bases can also be observed in national sport policies, according to Henry, Amara, Al-Tauqi, and Ping Chao (2005) and Houlihan (2005).

2. Other authors have shown interest in the establishment of urban regime typologies which mainly differ in terms of the nature of the objectives. Examples include Stoker and Mossberger (1994) and Graham, Phillips, and Maslove (1998).

3. The model is based on the works of Stone (1989). In order to avoid debates between pluralists and elitists in the study of community power, he advocated a transition from a power based on social control (power over) to one based on social production (power to).

4. The concept, as seen here, is inspired by Heclo's work (1974) on policy-oriented learning, except that this process is applicable not within the state, but rather within a specific coalition. This view of learning, focused mostly on the content of policies, is reflected in Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's work (1999). Our model focuses less on the importance of policy-oriented learning and excludes the cognitive concept of policy beliefs, among other factors. Technical information is an important, though not prominent, resource.

5. Our idea diverges from Bourdieu's mostly in the purpose of this social capital, whose model helped explain the social position of an actor and the reproduction of this social capital. Bourdieu defines the institutionalised forms of social capital as being the family, clan or club, but they can be transposed to relationships in a given subsystem. Bourdieu's position may therefore be useful to explain the evolution of public policies and the subsystem's dynamics.

6. This element gets all its meaning when we associate governance with negotiated trades between actors.

7. See, among others, Benson and Henderson (2005), Henry (2001), Nelson and Henderson (2005), Nichols (1996), Ravenscroft (1998) and Stevens and Green (2002).

8. A different cognitive approach is used by Houlihan (2005), who distinguishes the dominant policy paradigm as “the set of values and assumptions that influence policy choice and administrative practice across a range of services” (p. 181), from the service-specific policy paradigm, mainly focused on paradigm changes in the sector conception. Houlihan's model differs from Jobert and Muller's (1987) public action framework mostly by the absence of interaction between these two paradigms.