1 DECENTRALISATION PROCESS IN TURKEY: A CASE FOR UNSTABLE PASSIONATE Sonay Bayramoglu Ozugurlu * Nuray Erturk Keskin ** Paper presented at Political Economy and the Outlook for Capitalism, Joint Conference AHE, IIPPE, FAPE, Sorbonne Universite Paris, 5-7 Temmuz 2012, Paris. This study aims to analyze decentralisation process of Turkey as one of the fundamental trends for the state organization of the 21st century. Investigated object of this study has not clear-cut appearances since it has unpredictable daily tempo of acceleration with multi dimensional determinants and determinates. To overcome this uncertainty, it is aimed to focus on two titles: The first is about transformation of local and regional governments in Turkey. The second is about administrative channels for political participation of people. Thus, all these analytical efforts would be problematized by the concept of citizenship which concurrently captures democratic and social characters of the state-society relations. Key Words: Governance, autonomy, decentralization, regionalization, local governments, Turkey. Under the impulse of neoliberal agenda, state-society relations in Turkey have been radically transformed since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Distinctive features of the new political-administrative units could be identified as follows: (i) Attributing broad autonomy to local and regional governments in the name of participatory democracy; (ii) opening the administrative units to global actors’ intervention in the name of transparency; (iii) leaving the authority of public administration to the private sector in the name of effective and efficient management. In Turkey, all these transformations are structured by localisation and regionalisation processes through which Turkish public administration faces unfamiliar concepts and practices as follows; ‘cross-border cooperation and programs’, ‘development cooperation’, ‘service cooperation’, ‘regional development’, ‘the city diplomacy’, ‘the city/region potential’, ‘competition’, and the European identity. By implementing legal arrangements during the period of 2004-2005, local government system started to rest on the subsidiarity principle. However, rebuilding process of public administration and the state-society * Assist. Prof., Gazi University, sbayramoglu@gazi.edu.tr ** Assist. Prof., Ondokuz Mayis University, nekeskin@omu.edu.tr