SOSYAL POLİTİKA VE KALKINMA PARADİGMASININ DÖNÜŞÜMÜ ODAĞINDA TÜRKİYE’DE SOSYAL BELEDİYECİLİK

Abstract

Today, municipalities, as an emerging actor in the field of social policy, are active in many different fields. These social policy-related activities, which do not bear much resemblance to the decentralization and infrastructure services traditionally undertaken by municipalities in Turkey, have become increasingly widespread in the last 30 years and have become a common model in local politics under the name of 'social municipalism'. The fact that the responsibility for social policy has been individualized and depoliticized by dividing it between central states, local governments and civil society within the new meanings that the development paradigm has acquired in the neoliberal period, and that it has acquired new meanings with a focus on 'fighting poverty' as its first priority, has also had decisive effects on this municipalism model that has emerged in Turkey. Social municipalism, which has become a hegemonic local government model across the country today, regardless of political line, should be analyzed in this framework, in the axis of these global dynamics that brought it into being.

This study aims to present a panoramic view of the social municipalism model through a review of the annual reports of seven metropolitan municipalities. Accordingly, the social municipalism model, which is claimed to be based on three main axes, is analyzed as being based on the definition of social policy with a focus on disadvantaged groups, the municipality's support for local development for the benefit of capital, and finally, local governments' contribution to social reproduction. In this study, this municipalism model, which bears great similarities with the neoliberal urban governance narrative, will be discussed in the axis of transformations on a global scale, along with some local specificities it carries.