Cooperation Of Various Stakeholders In Providing Youth Services In Estonia

Youth policy is a relatively new challenging phenomenon studied under various contexts. In the context of EU studies, the youth policy is seen as system of the complex interactions between domestic, transnational, and supranational actors in the youth field. The young people require a new attitude, that means seeing youth policy across traditional sector boundaries and from youth perspectives. Currently, the main issue of youth policy implementation is the problem to organize an efficient interaction between different institutions and stakeholders across levels and sectors.

The important task of the paper is to present Estonian experience of the implementation cross sector integrated model of youth policy. The objectives of the paper:

-to explore how the main actors of youth policy identify cross sector integrated youth policy, their attitudes,views about it;

-to analyse how is youth policy playing out across vertical levels or horizontal levels of governance. If it is not working well and if so why? Consideration of and barriers to better implementation of integrated youth policy;

- to share good existing practices of cooperation between various stakeholders in the youth field and to introduce the key tools for good cooperation and participation in youth policy.

The main theoretical conceptions that are used in work:

-Simona Piattoni multilevel governance framework to study vertical and horisontal dimension of cooperation in Estonian youth policy.

-Howard Williamson theoretical approach“the five Cs” to characterize Estonian youth policy.

The analysis is based on the results of semi-structured interviews and 1 focus group with experts from youth field in Estonia. The survey examined the following issues:

• Knowledge about integrated youth policy across various stakeholders,
• Contribution of main stakeholders in developing  Estonian youth policy
• Cooperation between stakeholders.