The role of municipal associations in Turkey in the context of urban resilience: Union of Municipalities of Türkiye

Increasing urbanization today makes cities more vulnerable to a series of shocks and stresses. Efforts to reduce these risks in urban areas facing multiple hazard risks are increasing day by day, and the necessity of a management approach based on an integrated, comprehensive and collaborative governance approach emerges. City governments are trying to identify the underlying factors for the risks that cities are exposed to in the face of these challenging conditions, to reduce the future vulnerability of urban people and urban assets, to mitigate a series of shocks and stresses, to be prepared for them, to build urban resilience with appropriate resources and capacity building. At this point, the need for local collaborations that enable urban problems to be eliminated more effectively and quickly is increasing. Collaborations to be established by local governments in the process of building resilience provide positive contributions to local governments in terms of negotiating common goals, changing or sharing resources, increasing information, and sharing responsibility, as they are established on the basis of mutual interest and voluntariness when a single local actor does not have all the knowledge and power. The main purpose of the study is to evaluate the role of municipal unions as a local cooperation model in providing urban resilience. In this direction, an answer has been sought to the question of whether there are opportunities created by municipal unions in increasing the resilience of cities, and if so, what they are. Within the scope of the research, the example of the Union of Municipalities of Türkiye was evaluated as a field study. Qualitative content analysis method was used as a data analysis tool in the study. In the literature, it has been seen that the cooperation of local governments in urban resilience in line with the information obtained by the researcher increases urban resilience as it allows more than one local actor to act on a common denominator, around common problems, in mutual communication and cooperation. As one of the local cooperation models, the practices that the municipal unions carry out effectively with both sub-national and supra-national cooperation are presented to the municipalities in the categories of 'educational activities', 'experience sharing', 'lobbying activities', 'consulting services' and 'financial support'. It has been seen that it increases urban resilience with the contributions it provides. These results were supported by the findings obtained as a result of the field research conducted in the Union of Municipalities of Turkey.