Collaboration Between Women NGOs and Government in Turkey

Collaboration of NGOs and government is important to enhance adoption of effective public policies. In Turkey, there are increasing numbers of women’s NGOs as there are almost 300 women’s association only in Ankara and in İstanbul, two biggest cities of Turkey. Although the number of women’s NGOs is increasing every day, there is still limited information on the question whether they have strong linkages or networks between each other. Thus, one of the main research question of this paper is that “Do NGOs cooperate with each other” In fact, there are some initiatives such as Federation of Women’s Associations however the number of the member organizations accepted in these types of networks remain very limited. Thus, the first aim of this paper is to scrutinize whether Women’s NGOs cooperate with each other for any actions such as lobbying, policy processes, research projects etc. Secondly, this paper aims to examine the relationship between government and women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in policy making process in Turkey. In this level of analysis we ask the question whether women’s NGOs create any collaborations with government institutions in the process of women’s policy making processes?” For the aims of this research we collected two types of data from women’s NGOs under a research project funded by Scientific Research Coordination Unit of the Social Sciences University of Ankara. Firstly, an open-ended survey was run with 24 representatives of women’s NGOs during the workshop of the project. Secondly, a survey was run with app. 1000 members of women’s associations from İstanbul and Ankara from November 2017 to March 2018. This study contributes to the literature by analyzing NGO networking in Turkey by using a systematic analytical method. The preliminary results of this study shows that women’s NGOs in Turkey have very limited collaboration with both government and each other.