Introduction

Turkish local governments have undergone a radical transformation since the 1980s under the guise of decentralising and democratising reforms. At the heart of such important waves of legal reforms lay the municipalities as the main service provider in urban settings. In the framework of this chapter, I present a general overview of the state of policy analysis in Turkish municipalities. I argue that municipalities governed by very strong executives prioritise populist services delivered through sub-contracts and controlled weakly by political and civil actors and arbitrarily by central government.

I develop this analysis of municipal policies by following the stages of the policy cycle. Introduced originally by Harold Lasswell in the 1950s and then developed by Gary Brewer in the early 1970s, the policy cycle approach distinguishes different phases of a policy from its emergence to termination (Howlett and Ramesh, 1995, pp 10-11). The model widely acknowledged and taught since the 1980s is based on five main stages. In the first stage, the problem is identified and the agenda is set with regards to this problem. If the problem appears in the agenda of public actors, a course of action is created, identified or borrowed to deal with it. The adoption of every formulated policy cannot be taken for granted as decision-makers may act with different motivations and thus alter the formulated course of action. Therefore, the decision-making deserves a closer examination. Similarly, the adopted policy may alter during its implementation due to the executers’ practices, to the unexpected reaction of stakeholders and/ or to the unintended outcomes of the adopted policy. Finally, an eventual stage of evaluation is indispensable to be able to see the actual impact of the policy so that public actors can decide whether it will be sustained, modified or ended (Anderson, 1984, pp 36-8).

I develop my discussion on Turkish policy-making at the local level through these stages of the policy cycle approach. The stages of policy formulation and decision are combined as the hegemonic position of mayors is valid simultaneously for both stages. For this purpose, I first argue that populist, spectacular investments in the built environment predominate agendas of municipal policies.