The EU's direct and extensive effect on the Turkish public administration has begun with the declaration of Turkey as a candidate state in The Helsinki Summit of 1999 and Turkey has undertaken reforms in many contexts for the purpose of conforming to acquis communitare. The EU is one of the most important external actor for Turkey to perform administrative reforms. EU requires the candidate states to perform certain legal obligations and administrative reforms during the harmonization process. In this context, the regional policy and the establishment of the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) is the most important elements of these administrative reforms. Turkey today faces obligations to become a full member of the EU and so, entered a reconstruction process by abondoning the central regional development model. Because of this, regional development policies were not integrated into the negotiation process of the EU. In this period, Turkey takes the EU member states as a model for reforms and these period is named as “policy transfer”. On the literature, policy transfer is divided into two types: “voluntary policy transfer” and “obligated policy transfer”. Establishing the RDAs in Turkey is a clear example of “obligated policy transfer” which is a subtype of policy transfer. This study begins with the question that if the establishment of RDAs is an example of obligated policy transfer or not? In the study, the establishment of RDAs is supposed to be as an example of obligated policy transfer and the degree of the policy success is tried to be introduced. In this context, the degree of influence of EU and the aim to be a candidate state of EU is also analyzed within scope of the study. As the method, official documents of the EU and examples of the implementation in Turkey will be comparatively examined.
