Sister city relations and learning cities: The case of the Trabzon Metropolitan Municipality

Terms like "cooperativeness, governance, and globalisation" appeared in 20th century and highly raised its effectiveness in 21st century also corresponded in local governments and other areas. Together with the concept of cooperativeness which was discoursed in the sense of working, relationships were established in the local level and this situation created the new term sister city. Aim of thesis is to reveal how the sister town relations influence the local government units and the usage of comparison and learning organisations terms from the business administration to see whether it turns into a learning tool or not for the cities. The concept of learning organization draws attention to the importance of the concept of learning. The awareness of the importance of learning that is expected to occur between the cities and the sister city relations between the cities is related to the concept of learning organization in the study. The need of every day learning poses as an undeniable necessity for every individual and every organisations in the world as in connection to the globalisation and technological progress in the 21st century. Local governments might encounter various difficulties in this advancing technology era as a result of their diversified needs. This needs obliged the local governments to establish national and international collaboration and work together for the certain goals. Especially after 2000's the increase in the diversified needs sometimes put local governments into difficult situations. While most of the times the local governments managed to obtain these needs by their own possibilities sometimes their possibilities did not allowed them. At this exact point the sister town agreements which were established with the aim of cooperation might become a supplementary resource for the solution in some cases. It would be a wrong approach to consider sister town agreements solely based on economic cooperation. When analysed the cooperation between sister cities it can be seen that the relations are not only developed in economic area but rather mostly in social and cultural areas. The main aim in here is to increase the recognisability of the city in the world besides the purpose of countries and cities recognising and getting to know each other's culture. With reference to above information, sister city relations of the Trabzon, together with the usage of comparison and learning organisations terms from the business administration to see whether it turns into a learning tool or not for the cities, will be examined in the thesis work with the aim of making an important contribution to the literature. Keywords: Local Cooperation, Sister Town, Learning Organisations, Comparison.