Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG3: Public Administration Reform in CEE and CA (Physical) Author(s) Aslı Yılmaz Uçar Istanbul Altinbas University İstanbul Turkey Title Challenges of Governance During the State of Emergency: The Case of Turkey File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Aslı Yılmaz Uçar Abstract Governance is a key concept used to define the changes in public administration in which “old” bureaucratic and traditional forms of government are replaced with collaborative, participatory structures. However, most of the countries have experienced populist/authoritarian populist or state of emergency regimes in the last decades. As the populist / the authoritarian and emergency regimes exceed and broaden; transparency, accountability, and all possible ways of citizen empowerment, promoted by the governance paradigm, are challenged. This study began around the above-mentioned challenges and questions how the governance principles are challenged during a state of emergency. In order to reply to the question, the Turkish case on the state of emergency between 2016-2018 is studied. Emergency decrees issued during the state of emergency are exploited as the main source of data to observe the changes in the public administration which challenge the governance principles. It is observed from the Turkish case that the varied lines of changes made within the governmental structure during the state of emergency such as the concentration of executive power, the closure of civil society organizations, and media, increasing administrative tutelage power over local governments’ elected bodies, and the purge of public personnel, etc pose challenges to the basic principles of governance. In fact, all these challenges posed by the emergency politics became permanent for Turkey through the change of the governmental system from a parliamentary to a presidential system. Furthermore, it can be argued that even the principles are challenged by the emergency regime, governance structures survive the emergency regime but empowered actors, empowerment methods, etc are politicized.
