Emerging donors in a changing domestic and global context:Evidence from Turkey

The rise of new donors of official development assistance (ODA) since the 2000s is seen as a turning point in the field of international development, representative of the power shift between emerging powers and the established international order. Since 2002, Turkey has been identified as one of the emerging donors that have developed sizable ODA programs. In the meantime, Turkey's rapid rise as a donor of foreign aid throughout the 2000s also marks an unconventional turn in the course of its traditionally inert foreign policy. For scholars of international relations, this presents a puzzle: How, and more importantly, why, has Turkey's foreign aid policy evolved in the past two decades? What factors have exerted influence over Turkey's foreign aid policymaking, through which structures or agents, and to what extent? How do these factors differ from those present in other emerging donors? This dissertation aims to address these questions through an eclectic framework that borrows from various theoretical perspectives. The debate surrounding the rise of emerging donors has produced a recent stream of literature positioned at the crossroads of international relations, economics, development studies, and political geography. The objective of this dissertation is to contribute to this multidisciplinary literature by developing a three-level analytical framework to uncover Turkey's foreign aid policymaking within a dynamic global and domestic context. This dissertation argues that among the myriad of international and domestic factors, including ideational forces, material interests, and political institutions, the previously overlooked role of political actors at the individual level has also had a significant influence on Turkey's foreign aid policy priorities and modalities since the 1990s. Based on the same approach, the study also proposes a four-fold periodization of Turkish foreign aid policy between 1992 and 2022. With the findings it harvests from the Turkish case, it also presents a comparative account of emerging donors in order to assess similarities and differences in policy-making, and to locate Turkey within the existing typologies and categorizations. To investigate the shifts in Turkey's foreign aid policy in the past three decades, this study combines semi-structured elite interviews and primary documentary sources from the Turkish International Cooperation Agency (TİKA), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, Maarif Foundation and other non-governmental organizations to analyze Turkey's foreign aid policy in Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa.