Contribution of development agency to development: Case of Kastamonu

The development needs of countries include economic structures as well as improvement and development of socio-cultural structures. The developmental differences between the regions within the country and the limited budget that countries can use to increase their level of development necessitated regional development policies. Regional development policies have been based on grassroots policies since its inception and are intended to involve all local actors in national development efforts. Regional development agencies play an important role in how regional development policies will be implemented. The main purpose of regional development agencies is to discover the potential of the region and turn this potential into a value by using policies that are appropriate to the objectives of national development policies. In Turkey, regional development agencies have been established with a law in 2006 and based on 26 regions defined as Level II. One of these agencies is the North Anatolian Development Agency operating in the TR82 Region. In the first part of the study, development and regional development concepts are discussed. In the second part of the study, the historical development of regional development agencies, their aims, their duties and the North Anatolian Development Agency are mentioned. In the last part of the study, the data collected in the Kastamonu Region were analyzed and Chi-Kare, Man Whitney-U and Kruskal Walis tests were used to test the hypotheses. In the tests conducted, it was tried to determine the satisfaction levels of the participants in the activities carried out by the North Anatolian Development Agency in Kastamonu Region, to determine the level of accessibility to the agency, to determine the relationship between the expectations of the agency and the parallelism with the expectation of the public.