The transformations of the multi-layered governance of humanitarian migration in Turkey: A Network-Centred Perspective

This article develops and applies a mix-methods approach based on a combination of social network analysis and analysis of policy documents and interview material to analyse recent transformations in the organization of policymaking relations in the Turkish multi-level political systems, focusing on the policy field concerning humanitarian migration. In doing so, it addresses four limitations of existing research on multi-layered policymaking regarding humanitarian migration, which tends to focus on policy and legal documents rather than real-world interactions, conceptualise governmental levels in morphological terms, neglect conflictual interactions, and narrowly focus on big cities. The analysis conducted allows to derive three claims about the organizations of multi-level policymaking interactions related to humanitarian migration in Turkey. First, despite the high centralisation of the management of humanitarian migration in Turkey at the national level, particularly around the Ministry of Interior, some responsibilities have been shifting to actors located at the subnational and global levels. Second, policymaking interactions are largely developed along the vertical dimension of policymaking, with a rather limited involvement of nongovernmental actors in policymaking. Third, the multilevel governance of humanitarian migration in Turkey still very much resembles ‘a coordinated and negotiated order among public authorities across levels’ and has not become more conflictual in the last decade (as in other South European countries), despite the growth of humanitarian migration flows in the country.