Strategic Relations and Sport Policy Making: The Case of Aerobic Union and School Sports Federation Bulgaria
The dismissal of totalitarian regimes across Eastern Europe challenged the strategic orientation of sport in these countries. A central issue concerning the shaping of the new sport policies and the role of democratic states surprisingly as yet has not generated thorough academic analyses. As a result of transformations, the sport sector is undergoing massive adaptations, innovations, and reconfigurations leading to the emergence of new arrangements and actors pursuing different projects. Studying this process from a Strategic Relation perspective invites an analysis of sports policy, which accounts equally for events, actors, structures, and relations. More specifically, this approach offered a fruitful insight into the state and its strategic relations in sport policy making. One aspect of this study of theoretical interest is that, so far as can be ascertained, it is the first time the Strategic Relations approach has been applied to a Communist state.