Urban Civil Structures Effect in the Development of Governance Concept in Developing Countries: The Case of City Councils in Turkey

摘要

Governance is one of the main approaches of New Public Management (NPM) (Meuleman: 2008, Landman and Robinson: 2009) and it is an important concept for Turkey as it affects the entire private and the public sector. Expressing the participated governing process, its field of application includes non-governmental organizations and civil communities, central government and local governments. The emergence of more flexible decentralized and entrepreniuneal urban politics have been interpreted as an important part of transition from government to governance in economic and political context in Turkey like the other countries (Stoker: 1996, Ward: 2000, Jones: 1998, Oatley 1998, Whitehead: 2003). The mutual interaction with governance, the change in urban politics in Turkey has affected the new restructuring in local governments in large scale. This interaction is inevitable at a time of local and central government concept is eroding, the concepts of citizenship and participation are changing and urban economic development is restructured and globalized (Mac Leod and Goodwin: 1999, Stoker: 1996, Whitehead: 2003). The City Councils concept has appeared with Agenda-21 accepted after the Rio Summit. The City Councils in Turkey is an outcome of Local Agenda21 and established as an implementation of it. The main aims of them are to solve the problems that the cities are faced with, which affect the urban sustainability resulting from the city governments. The City Councils are established interdependently from the local governments in Turkey. Nonetheless they have made solutions for all the problems in the city as a civil initiative. But local governments, municipalities and private provincial administration have not notified them. The City Councils in Turkey gained legal status in 2005 after the admission of Municipality Act numbered 5393 in which there are regulations for them like in the article 76. In order to evaluate the city councils in Turkey two concepts, which are “governance” and “Local Agenda-21”, should be demystified. It is known that, city councils are suggested as a new participatory model based on governance in local. But the governance concept shouldn’t be seen only as a part of establishing new participatory models in cities but also, it's a key concept to establish a new government and social system as an instrument of New Public Management. In this study, it is argued if the City Councils implementations are transformed into governance based implementation and results of these implementations will be evaluated in terms of local governments and non-governmental organizations. Also, the structure, implementations and decisions of striking city councils in Turkey will be examined and the barriers in local governance will be discussed.