Active participation or legal obligation? A qualitative study of the effectiveness of participatory methods designed for local participation.

Abstract

The most effective structure in designing the participation process is local government units. It is much easier for local governments to establish closer dialogue with citizens, create negotiation environments for them and identify appropriate needs for participation. The intense feeling of centralization in terms of the duties and responsibilities of local governments in Turkey leads to the inability to transfer the negotiation processes in participation practices to realistic/realizable practices. As a result, permanent institutional practices do not carry on sustainably; they turn into structures established to fulfill legal obligations only. The transition from government to governance, with the winds of change began after 1990 in Turkey, revealed the necessity of reorganizing the duties and responsibilities of executives at both local and national levels regarding active citizenship; the necessity of activating local participation mechanisms was emphasized. For this reason, the application of the Headmen's (Headman means "Muhtar" in Turkish. Sometimes "Mukhtar" uses instead of Headman in some studies. But in this study Headman used to descripe partipatory process. In Turkey, there two types of "Headman". One of them is village headman. Villages are legal entities, so village headmen have much more authority. The second one is neigborhood headmen. Neigborhoods are not legal entities. So that, neigborhood headman is responsible to City Mayor.). Workshop, designed by the Tekirdağ Metropolitan Municipality, was periodically subject to the research as an ongoing method, and its effectiveness for citizen participation was analyzed using the qualitative research method in the study. The reason why Tekirdağ was chosen in the study is that it has the only metropolitan municipality in the Thrace Region, periodic meetings and participatory democracy discourses on the sharing of duties and powers with new regulations increase. The practice was examined through 6 meetings held until 2020 since there were disruptions in the planned meetings of the practice on account of the fact that the study coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic process.