Turkey's role in the global development assistance community: the case of TIKA (Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency)

Abstract

Although the world has never been wealthier than its current state, there are more than a billion people, one in five of the world’s population, still living in extreme poverty. As the world has become ‘a global village’ in the last century, the problems of nations are not only their own problems but the problems of the international community. International crime, wars and conflicts, trade in illegal drugs, the spread of diseases like AIDS and thousands of refugees from troubled zones in and around developed and relatively better-off states, attest to that. To tackle development problems globally, the United Nations developed its own institutions like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International Trade Centre (ITC), etc. in the 1960s. However, these institutions have never been adequate to respond to the needs of underdeveloped and developing nations. As a result of this, national development cooperation agencies were established to help alleviate the burden of the UN institutions. As well as highly developed nations’ agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Department for International Development (DFID), etc., there emerged new donor countries to this equation in the recent decades as their economic situation began to allow them to help the outside world as well. Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA) is one example of this recent trend. The emergence of new players in the donor community such as Turkey, India, Korea, Mexico, Russia and China has brought new impetus and opportunities to the global development community. Development assistance is also undergoing a serious transformation in the wake of 9/11; security and conflict resolution issues have become the main issues to be addressed by the top donors like the USA and Japan, although poverty reduction still occupies the central stage. Aid effectiveness, aid coordination and tied aid are becoming more and more focal points of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of OECD. In this context, Turkey represents a special case in the sense that on the one hand it is a recipient country, whereas on the other, it is also a donor country. This paper attempts to analyse accomplishments as well as shortfalls of Turkey’s Official Development Assistance (ODA). It starts with an overview of changing trends of development assistance and its future challenges, and then