Local Governance Reforms

Abstract

Centralization has been an essential element of Turkish political and administrative system since the Ottoman era. There is a vast literature showing that not much has changed after the proclamation of the republic, as local governments have most of the time perceived only as administrative extensions of central government (Mardin 1973; Heper 1974; Sayarı 1978; Ertürk 1980; Öniş 1997; Özbudun 2006; Röth et al. 2016). Local governance and decentralization had not been an explicit feature of policy agenda until 1999 when Helsinki summit paved the way for Turkey’s accession to the European Union (EU) when Turkey was declared as a candidate country. Having adopted this perspective, the government undertook an ambitious public and political reform program as regards implementation of European governance principles, including transparency, accountability and responsiveness, participatory government and effectiveness. The reform program included, among others, the reinforcement of local governance and the imposition of subsidiarity principle in the center–periphery relations. Literature implies that the Europeanization of the relations between political center and the periphery in terms of local and regional governance, which were unfamiliar terms to Turkish political scene before EU process, was imposed by EU bodies (Sözen and Shaw 2002, 2003; Cizre 2004; Heper 2005; Çayhan 2008; Türkmen 2008). However, this process was to show its impact only to the extent that the windows of political opportunity, as defined by Kingdon (1984), motivated the reformers to do so. © 2020, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.