ABSTRACT
The third theme in the Handbook focuses on policy communities in physical activity. Notwithstanding diverse and competing conceptualisations about policy communities they can usefully be understood as sets of actors who coalesce around, and shape, policy making about an issue – in this case physical activity. Physical activity policy communities contribute to enhancing, challenging and indeed undermining the policy making process. A key aim in analysing policy communities in these chapters is to understand who makes decisions about physical activity, how those decisions are made and in whose interests. There is no scope within a single theme to address all policy communities in the physical activity sector. The selected chapters nevertheless illustrate the complex network of actors and relationships, beyond state-bureaucratic ones, that characterise multiple types of policy community with common and competing interests and diverse and unequal influences on policy making about physical activity.
