Mutations institutionnelles post-soviétiques et temporalité individuelle : la politique de la jeunesse en Estonie

The institutional change in post-Soviet countries is analyzed using the example of the development of youth policy (YP) in Estonia from 1990 to 2013 and shows the necessity of articulating individual and institutional temporalities in order to understand the evolution of a public policy sector. Indeed, in the Estonian case, the institutional rupture (policy) did not occur during the collapse of the Soviet Union (politics) but during the period of political stability when the Ministry of Education was moved away from the capital in 2001. YP is now seen as a trans-sectorial policy incorporated into the State planning process based on the objectives of the European Union. At the same time, the State has strengthened its strategic role in policy planning. If one considers individual temporalities, it is having moved the department and not the fall of the USSR that generated the rupture in State officials’ trajectories. It gave young agents acquainted with European policies access to key positions. The change in Estonian YP reveals the importance of studying how policy leaders were socialized in order to understand the highly heterogeneous behavior of reformers in post-Soviet countries.