Since the last two decades, the unstoppable hegemony of moderate Islamist in Turkey has gone far beyond the mainstream of socio-political discourse. Surprisingly, in the seemingly apolitical areas like welfare and housing services, the AKP’s offensive has been more visible than ever. Particularly, through the main government agency – the Housing Development Administration (TOKI) – AKP has successfully struggled to transform mass social housing into profitable business operating under conditions of neoliberal globalization. Driven by the logic of the market and, simultaneously, being directly accountable to the Prime Ministry, TOKI has recently become one of the main lords of welfare, delivering market-based housing solutions high above the financial means of socially disadvantaged populations. In this paper, to explore these phenomena in a more detailed fashion, I go beyond the classical understanding of governing and focus on the changing modes and patterns of governance. In the Turkish setting, it is particularly the housing sector where governance practices, featured by partnership and participation, gradually become the main tools for (cross-)sectoral coordination. It is also in housing where the central government, employing complex strategies of institutional restructuring, strives to play a more dominant role as both regulator and sub-contractor, becoming in final instance an omnipotent meta-governor. Therefore, the main goal of the paper is to examine the role of TOKI in the emergence of new modalities of welfare governance in Turkey. To this end, I investigate how the state housing agency has been employed to both facilitate the AKP’s sectoral hegemony and introduce the jungle laws of the market into new registers of social reality. Finally, it is argued that governance offers a potentially valuable meeting point for analyzing the interlock between welfare transformations, the reorganization of state agency and globalization dynamics.
