Turkish foreign aid policy in AKP period: historical institutionalism revisited

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1606913 (Table of Contents)

Since the Justice and Development Party came to power, Turkey has turned into an active and dynamic donor country in the foreign aid arena from being only a receiver country. Recent developments of Turkish foreign aid policy and the rise of activities of Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) becomes evident as the most prominent success stories of Turkish foreign policy in the last decade. Understanding the underlying mechanism that led to such a remarkable change constitutes the main motivation of this study. To that end, the dialectical relationship among the main institution of Turkish foreign policy (i.e., Westernization), Turkish foreign aid agent (i.e., TIKA) and contextual factors (i.e., domestic developments in the AKP era) is scrutinized in the light of theoretical assumptions of flexible version of Historical Institutionalism (HI). By focusing on dialectical relationship, this study gives equal weight to evolution of the concept of Westernization, domestic developments in the AKP era, and transformation of TIKA as explanatory determinants in explaining the policy change in Turkish foreign aid policy. In this regard, the study puts forward that the concurrent occurrence of these determinants in the AKP era have played a major role for emergence of the change in Turkish foreign aid policy.