Regional Governance in Turkey on the Road to Eu Membership: Comparison of Three Regions

In the last decades across many parts of Europe a regional level of governance has been emerging, a trend which has not been observed in Turkey despite its extreme regional disparities. Since the Helsinki summit of the EU leaders in 1999 when Turkey was admitted as a candidate country, EU conditionality has been increasingly challenging Turkey's centralised territorial governance. This book has two overall aims. First, it aims to identify the key mechanisms through which institutional stability has been sustained over time hindering the emergence of a level of regional governance in Turkey. Second, it examines whether and the ways in which EU conditionality and/or policy-learning is leading to institutional change in the current period through a comparative study of three regions in Turkey. This book addresses the gap in literature on institutional capacity at the regional level in Turkey and on the attitudes of local and regional actors in Turkey to the issue of regional governance and the EU. The analysis in this book should be useful to professionals and regional policy practitioners.