Digital Transformation of Public Services as State Transformation: An Overview of the Experience in Turkey During the Pandemic

Abstract

This paper discusses the contextual aspects of the digital transformation of the Turkish public administration system during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that the accelerating process of the digitalization of public services during the pandemic should be understood in connection with the ongoing, broader transformation of the Turkish state into the neoliberal regulatory state that has been ideologically framed as a facilitator of market-led economic development. This argument is based on the “state transformation approach” developed as an alternative analytical tool to address governance outcomes as a manifestation of neoliberally informed shifts in the location of state power, in the groups of actors that exercise state power, and in the ideas used to rationalize the exercise of it.

Introduction

The digitalization of the public sector, which has its roots in the rise of the knowledge-based economy during the late-1990s and early-2000s (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018), has been catalyzed by disruptions and shifts in governance and service delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has, over this period, become a mechanism of crisis management commonly employed by governments to ensure access to services that are no longer safe to deliver in person. In Turkey, for instance, the e-government website (turkiye.gov.tr) has seen an exponential growth in the number of daily users, site visits and related services throughout the pandemic. In August 2022, the country’s Vice President announced that nine in every 10 Turkish citizens over 15 years old are using the e-government website (Kutbe, 2022). In that context, the head of the Digital Transformation Office (DDO), established to coordinate the digital transformation of the public sector as per Presidential Decree No. 1 issued on 10 July 2018 following the country’s transition into an executive presidential system, emphasized the citizens’ satisfaction with the website’s operation as a one-stop shop where integrated services such as My Vehicles has been used by more than 300 million times since it was introduced in 2020 (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022c). Turkish state officials’ emphasis on numbers suggests a descriptive and technocratic treatment of change in public administration that can be associated with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s effective use of technology to strengthen the service delivery capacity of the state in the face of a global health crisis.

Yet, neither crises nor policy frameworks are neutral phenomena. That is to say that state officials do not simply encounter crises and automatically formulate policies to address the social, economic and political aspects of a crisis on the basis of some objective factors. They are rather actively involved in both defining and addressing situations as crises through processes of interpretation and representation (Weldes, 1996). State officials, in other words, choose among issues and problems in defining what constitutes a crisis, privilege particular governance measures and practices as solutions to it, and promote particular ideas to rationalize the implementation of the measures and paradigms chosen to address the situation (Weldes, 1996). More importantly, the times of crisis, which disrupt established thinking about and ways of dealing with the world (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018), can be used by ruling authorities as “states of exception” to redefine the rules and the extent of the exercise of state power (Agamben, 2005). Looked at this way, digitalization initiatives and their associated policy practices are more than a means to solve the technical problems of efficiency and innovation in processes of governance and service delivery. They emerge and operate in a specific “strategic-relational” setting, borrowing Bob Jessop’s conceptualization of the modern state in terms of “immanent biases that make state institutions, capacities, and resources more accessible to some political forces, some identities, some interests, some strategies, some spatio-temporal horizons, and some actions than others” (Jessop, 2018, 48). More specifically, this means that the digital transformation of the public sector, which has functioned as a mode of crisis management during the pandemic, denotes a process of the re-establishment of socio-political power relations through the selection of particular models of governance (and the marginalization of the alternatives) in response to the constraints and opportunities located at the intersection of domestic and global political economy relations.

The purpose of this paper is to expand on the strategic, institutional and normative aspects of the digitalization of the Turkish public sector undertaken in the context of the management of the COVID-19 crisis. It argues that the accelerating process of the digital transformation of the Turkish public sector during the pandemic should be understood in connection with the ongoing transformation of the Turkish state into the neoliberal regulatory state that has been ideologically represented as a facilitator of market-led development. This argument is based on the “state transformation approach” (Hameiri & Jones, 2013; 2015; 2020) have developed to examine governance outcomes as a manifestation of shifts in the location and distribution of state power, in the groups of actors that exercise state power, and in the ideas used to rationalize the exercise of it.

This article is organized on the basis of two distinct sections. The first section provides a conceptual discussion of the state transformation approach. This conceptual framework is then used in the next section to contextualize the digitalization of public services in Turkey that has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conceptualizing the Digital Transformation of Public Services as State Transformation

The concept of conflict is central to the state transformation approach Hameiri & Jones (2013, 2015, 2020) have developed as an analytical model to explain the strategic aspects of the governance of transboundary issues such as pandemics, transnational terrorism, irregular migration, organised crime, and other challenges that transcend national borders. This approach defines the state as an expression of social and political power relationship rather than a mere collection of coherent institutions and agencies that presumably operate in autonomy from societal influence and interest (Hameiri & Jones, 2013). The state, institutions, policies and strategies that altogether constitute the governance of issues, according to this analytical approach, are never neutral. State policies and institutions provide the sets of rules and regulations that “directly and indirectly influence the distribution of wealth, power and the structure of social relationships” (Hewison et al., 1993: 17). Hence, policy models and institutional reforms are of significant interest to different actors such as businesses seeking contracts to advance their profits; political and bureaucratic elites who decide on who is entitled to get what resources, when and how; as well as taxpayers, banks, and foreign donors that provide the funding for the related projects and initiatives envisioned in the policy (Hameiri & Jones, 2020).

This situation applies to the governance of all issues, including the digitalization of healthcare services, which has been promoted as a means of creating an effective public sector in delivery of the citizens’ medical needs (Prainsack, 2020b; Schou & Hjelholt, 2018). The digitalization of the health sector develops through policy decisions and strategies that go beyond the organization of the adoption of necessary technologies and coordination of secure exchange of data among relevant public administration institutions and other technical issues relating to the effective provision of services to the citizens. The decisions and strategies that govern the transfer of digital technologies and information systems also concern the privatization of public sector datasets, capabilities of data collection and analysis, and other responsibilities for key infrastructure that may undermine the citizens’ access to welfare services such as benefits and medical care (Collington, 2022). Technology companies that have become key players in the health sector in different ways, ranging from the production of devices and software used for patient monitoring to the establishment and administration of private research institutes, have used personal data to anticipate human behavior as “a new form of capitalist value creation” (Prainsack, 2020a: 440). However, the “assetization” of data is implicated in a “shift towards rentiership” as it has been characterized by efforts to extract revenues through creation and fortification of monopolistic networks and other modes of ownership and control over resources (Birch et al., 2020). In this regard, the transfer of responsibility for data processing to private companies has raised concerns over the commercialization of publicly funded research partnerships between universities and hospitals in Denmark, which has long been hailed as the leader of public sector digitalization (Collington, 2022). It appears that the technologies that are produced at public hospitals do not come at any cost to the Danish state for the time being. Yet, the state may find itself as a customer of the technologies developed through use of its public research infrastructure, when the products will be ready for domestic and global market consumption in the future (Collington, 2022).

The state transformation approach’s conceptualization of the state as an expression of power is informed by a “strategic-relational” understanding of the state as offered by (Poulantzas, 1978) and (Jessop, 1983). The state, according to Poulantzas (1978: 128–129) is “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed within the State in a necessarily specific form” (emphasis in the original). The state, from this perspective, does not refer to a set of functions or ensemble of institutions that exercise power; however, “state power certainly exists” (Jessop, 1983: 273, cited in Hewison et al., 1993: 4). State power denotes a complex and dynamic set of social relationships that shape the use of the state apparatus, which comprises the coercive, judicial and other bureaucratic parts of the state (Hewison et al., 1993). This approach suggests that the specific forms that public institutions take or the ways in which they operate are shaped by particular interests that are promoted (or undermined) through the use of state power by “politicians and state officials located in specific parts of the state in specific conjunctures” (Jessop, 2018).

Given the dependence of capitalist states on the expansion of capitalist economies to generate employment and revenues, the interests of the capitalist class are privileged in the process (Hameiri & Jones, 2015; 2020). This does not necessarily mean that social conflicts occur only in class terms and that gender, ethnic, religious, and other identities have no basis for the mobilization of political struggles over access to power and resources. It is rather to point out that the conditions under which social and other inequalities and contests (and accompanying social coalitions of interests) emerge and develop are shaped by the inherently crisis-ridden and transformative nature of capitalist development (Hameiri & Jones, 2020; Rodan, 2018). This means that the inherent crises and contradictions of capitalist development (that are grounded in the constant improvement of the means of production and continuous expansion of market relations into new locations) result in the intensification of intra-elite rivalries and the emergence of new social forces or coalitions of interests. These conflicts over the distribution of the rewards and costs of capitalist development create pressures and opportunities for the ruling political elites and their opponents (Hameiri & Jones, 2020; Rodan, 2018). These domestic struggles that are located in global political economy relations are mediated by the ruling political elites through modifying the specific aspects of the rules and extent of the exercise of state power (Hameiri & Jones, 2020; Rodan, 2018).

The current neoliberal regulatory state model, in which the achievement and maintenance of “market credibility” has become the most important policy objective for governments, is a product of these historically specific struggles (Hameiri, 2009; 2011). The regulatory state has emerged in the West out of a rising social unrest experienced in the context of the late-1970s capitalist crisis. It has been exported to non-Western countries through structural adjustment policies and good governance aid programmes promoted by the international financial institutions in the following decades. Economic liberalization policies (such as the privatization of public assets and services, and deregulation of international trade and finance) that were championed by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations were presented as “neutral arrangements” for making the state more efficient through strengthening its capacity to facilitate global competitiveness (Hameiri & Jones, 2015). These policies redefined the function of government from securing developmentalist outcomes to endorsing market-led development through setting targets and guidelines for diverse public and private actors, and managing transnational security risks. These measures were driven by efforts to undermine the power of trade unions and other class-based organizations (that rested on national institutions of bargaining), and endorse transnationalized forms of finance and production networks introduced to restore capitalist class power (Hameiri, 2009; Hameiri & Jones, 2013; 2015). The reformulation of the task of government from organizing the national economy to adapting national politics to the “pressures of transnational market forces” entailed the insulation of policy-making arenas from popular interference through creating semi-autonomous, issue-based regulatory units that operate outside the scope of established institutions of representative democracy and formal political processes (Hameiri & Jones, 2015). These changes to the state apparatus, which disadvantaged certain ministries with control over socio-economic processes, have been justified through arguments that “‘bureaucratic’ government control is less effective, costlier and more susceptible to undesirable political ‘interference’ than light-touch regulation by non-political actors with issue-specific expertise” (Hameiri & Jones, 2015: 60). This newly defined role of the state as a regulator of global competitiveness has in practice meant the dismantling of the post-Second World War Keynesian welfare state, which was premised on the idea that national governments should mobilize resources to maintain a balance between supply and demand, and directly interfere in the economy to secure employment, industrialization and income distribution to compensate market failures (Hameiri & Jones, 2015). In non-Western states, this shifting focus from the national to the global economy was reflected in the demise of the import-substitution policies and related developmental state projects promoted by donors to strengthen their domestic industrial capacity in the post-war era (Hameiri & Jones, 2015).

The marginalization of material conflict has been a key aspect of the operation of the regulatory state where political leadership seeks to sustain social and political stability through a commitment to supporting the efficient functioning of global markets. The regulatory state rests on a particular notion of politics that is viewed as a “set of external factors hampering the natural functioning of markets” (Rodan et al., 2001). In this conception of politics, social groups that seek to extract special benefits through the state represent the biggest obstacle to efficient markets (Rodan et al., 2001). This approach, which considers social conflict as an aberration, has been associated with the rise of discourses of expertise and managerialism that define contestations over the distribution of material resources through bureaucratic structures as problems that result from “undesirable” forms of political interference in the economy (Hameiri, 2009). The capacity of the state to insulate markets from politics, from this perspective, should be strengthened by developing new mechanisms of governance that relocate state power and authority to experts, managers and other technocratic actors who are not popularly or politically accountable (Hameiri, 2009; 2015). These arrangements, through which policy-making is framed as a matter of effective governance (instead of securing a political consensus between competing interests), have been crucial in undermining the ability of opposition groups to contest the spectrum of responses to the issues addressed (Hameiri, 2009; 2015).

Together with this logic of “rule by expertise” that has accompanied the dispersion of authority to advisors and other unelected public and private governance actors operating inside or outside the formal boundaries of government, a shift towards the politics of culture has underpinned the ideological setting within which these transformations in statehood have occurred (Hameiri, 2009; 2011). The growing emphasis on social values by political parties as the basis of their agendas illustrates this trend. Today, even politicians on the left of politics in many Western and non-Western states dismiss the representation of class-based interests in governance processes, and emphasize values, leadership, and market participation as the basis of “good politics” (Hameiri, 2010). Unequal opportunities for market participation between different social groups within and across nations have rarely found their way to the mainstream political discourse. In this form of anti-competitive and highly hierarchical politics of culture, where material conflict is discredited, immigration, civil rights, abortion, gender equality, and the relationship between the state and religion have become the main points of reference mainstream right and left parties have used to distinguish themselves and their claim to political representation (Hameiri, 2010). The blurring of the traditional left-right agendas manifests itself in voting patterns that no longer follow class lines (Hameiri, 2010).

The processes of transformations described above suggest that state transformation encompasses shifts in the location and distribution of state power, in the groups of actors and agencies that exercise state power, and in the normative-ideological rationales for the exercise of state power (Hameiri, 2009; Hameiri & Jones, 2015). These changes to the ways in which state power is produced and exercised occur through 1) overthrow or modification of existing institutions and mechanisms of governance, and the formation and capacity development of new institutional and governmental arrangements through which power is extracted and exercised; 2) establishment of public–private partnerships within the formal governmental apparatus that enable exercise of political power by experts, managers and other private actors; and 3) promotion of norms and ideologies concerning the objectives for which political power is to be properly extracted and used (Hameiri, 2009). These attempts and initiatives to reshape the state and its institutional and ideological underpinnings may attract resistance and support from different groups depending on the effects of these transformations on their interests. Using this conceptual framework, the next section contextualizes the patterns of these strategic, institutional and ideological shifts in the Turkish state organization through the digitalization of the public sector during the pandemic.

Contextualizing the Digitalization of the Turkish Public Sector in Light of Ongoing Shifts in the Location, Actors, and Purposes of State Power

In the period since the Demirel government’s declaration on 24 January 1980 to liberalize the Turkish economy in response to a severe debt crisis unfolding since the late-1970s, social conflict in Turkey is engrained in inequalities that have further been exacerbated by an export-led, foreign capital-dependent growth strategy. As noted above, this outward oriented development strategy pursued by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the West shifted the role of the state from supporting national development outcomes to facilitating global competitiveness (Hameiri & Jones, 2015; 2020). The strategic approach followed to enhance the competitive capacity of Turkey in the global economy relied on significant cuts in real wages and subsidies for agricultural products, privatizations, and the provision of the business sector with favorable exchange rates, tax rebates and other incentives for exports. At one point, Turkey was showcased as a success story by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international financial institutions that promoted the neoliberal regulatory statehood in Turkey and other developing countries through loans, dead relief and technical assistance (Akyuz & Boratav, 2003; Boratav et al., 2001). Yet, the fall of the inflation rate from three digit-figures in 1980 to 35–40% in the subsequent few years and the achievement of an approximately 6% annual growth rate of the GDP during 1981–1988 that were praised by the IMF as a successful implementation of structural adjustment reforms occurred in a highly oppressive environment created by the military coup of September 1980 (Akyuz & Boratav, 2003; Boratav et al., 2001; Ertugrul & Selcuk, 2001). Moreover, this internationally promoted growth model, which was dependent on short-term foreign capital flows, increased the vulnerabilities and imbalances in the Turkish economy, paving the way for recurrent crises following short periods of economic boom as experienced in 1994, 1998, and 2001 (Orhangazi & Yeldan, 2021; Yalman et al., 2018). The 2001 financial crisis, according to official figures, left 390,000 people unemployed in just 1 year and resulted in a 14.4% decline in real wages in the manufacturing sector (Ozdemir, 2020). The stabilization programme the ruling three-party-coalition government concluded with the IMF in May 2001 was again based on a series of neoliberal reforms such as an operationally independent central bank, privatization of remaining state enterprises, and further reductions in agricultural and other subsidies (Ozdemir, 2020).

It was against this background the AKP rose to power in November 2002, only 15 months after it was founded. The party received 34% of the votes but managed to form a single party government due to the fact that only one other party was able to clear the 10% threshold required for parliamentary representation. Its electoral success reflects the above-mentioned demise of the politics of class-based interest representation. Together with the urban poor, the party garnered the votes of the winners of neo-liberal globalization. The so-called “green capital” or conservative entrepreneurs and business owners based in the cities of the Anatolian heartland, who owed their wealth to low wages and other opportunities generated by the export-led growth strategy of the 1980s, constituted the backbone of the AKP’s social power base. The support and loyalty of these capitalist fractions was crucial not only for the AKP’s rise to power as an alternative political actor in crisis-hit Turkey but also for overcoming the challenges posed by rival socio-political forces during its second and third term in office. The party also enjoyed the support of the “secular” or Istanbul-based, large businesses with access to trans-national capital networks that were disappointed with the poor performance of the previous coalition governments (for details, see Akcay, 2021; Onis, 2006).

The AKP’s implementation of the IMF’s market liberalization coincided with a period of capital inflows that facilitated economic growth. However, the economic growth model, as discussed above, was highly speculative from the start and policy preferences relied on external debt accumulation (Orhangazi & Yeldan, 2021). This form of “dependent financialization” relied on mounting household debt, low interest rates, and continuous capital inflows (Akcay, 2021: 81). The global financial crisis in 2008, sparked by the collapse of the American real estate bubble, resulted in a 5% rise in the rate of unemployment and a 40% fall in economic activity in Turkey by the first quarter of the 2009 financial year (Ercan et al., 2010). The AKP responded to the crisis by reducing interest rates to record lows and increasing government spending in infrastructure and construction projects to simulate growth (Rawdanowics, 2010). In the meantime, the “quantitative easing” monetary policy adopted by the major central banks in Western countries to combat the recession through large scale purchases of bonds and other financial assets from the banks (Breedon et al., 2012) significantly benefitted Turkey.

Yet, interruption to capital flows by changes in the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies from 2013 onwards did not only threaten economic growth in Turkey but also the social welfare regime established by AKP after further liberalizing wage-labor relations (Akcay, 2021). Economic crises were accompanied by rising tensions in political partnerships, as reflected in the Gezi Park protests that put liberal groups in the opposition and the widening gap between conservative elites that peaked in the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. The year 2017 marks a turning point for the consolidation of executive powers and the fundamental restructuring of the institutional fabric of the republic with the constitutional referendum, but years previous signaled the shifting economic dynamics and local alliances. In this light, the transition to the presidential system can be seen as a means to contain future crises; the consolidation of power under the presidency is characterized by a vision to fast-track crisis management. Nonetheless, the continuing economic recession coupled with currency crises, capital outflow, and mounting public debt in the years since indicate a “crisis of crisis management” (Akcay, 2021: 91).

In this regard, the digitalization of the public sector has become a key aspect of the AKP’s efforts to address the inherent pressures and crises of the country’s dependent financialization. The digital transformation of public services, as noted in the introduction, has its origins in the rise of the knowledge-based economy, which is premised on the idea that economic activities should be modelled on entrepreneurialism, investment in social capital and good governance (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018). The advances in the broadband technologies in the late-1990s and early-2000s reinforced neoliberally informed normative preference that was advocated by powerful international organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the European Union (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018). While the 1990s witnessed the establishment of the infrastructural basis of the digital economy through large investments in telecommunications, computers, databases and servers, the availability of cheap loans and increased levels of investments in technology firms generated by the quantitative easing policy of the post-2008 recession era contributed to the rise of Google, Facebook, Apple and other Big Tech firms in the global markets (Srnicek, 2017). In this economic system, data has been treated as a “particular kind of raw material” or the new oil that must be “extracted, refined, and used in a variety of ways” (Srnicek, 2017: 39–40. For a critical discussion of the “new oil” argument, see Prainsack, 2019).

The adoption of digital technologies into the public sector in Turkey (and elsewhere) has taken place alongside the rising appeal of this digital economy as a new system of growth and accumulation in the post-2008 recession era. While some projects (such as the Tax Offices Automation Project—VEDOP—initiated by the Ministry of Finance in 1998 to link the tax offices, and the Central Population Management System—MERNIS—developed by the Ministry of Interior Affairs in 2003 to assign a unique identification number to Turkish citizens) and strategic guidelines (such as the 2003 Urgent Action Plan which proposed the implementation of the “e-Transformation Turkey Project”) were produced in the late-1990s and early-2000s with the objective of benefitting from technological revolution and transforming the country into information society (OECD, 2004), the introduction of the e-Devlet Kapısı (e-Government Gateway) on 18 December 2008 officially marks the beginning of the digital transformation of the Turkish public sector. When the portal was launched, there were only nine participating institutions offering a total of 22 types of services to the citizens and enterprises (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022a).

The Turkish government’s digitalization of the public sector as a mode of capitalist crisis management appears to have begun accelerating in the period following the country’s transition into an executive presidential system in 2018. As noted above, the consolidation of state power under executive presidency represents the AKP’s response to the financial crisis that was unfolding since 2013 when the US Reserve Bank signalled the reversal of its low interest rate policy (Akcay, 2021). This process of relocating state power and authority to semi-autonomous, non-accountable governance spaces preceded the April 2017 presidential referendum. The Sovereign Wealth Fund of Turkey (Türkiye Varlık Fonu or TVF for short) was one of these institutional arrangements introduced to generate capital shortly before the state of emergency declared following the coup attempt in July 2016. Its stated primary mandate is focused on increasing asset values and investments in Turkey. Its portfolio includes Turkcell and Türk Telekom, with the state (or the wealth fund) having controlling shares in both, and Türksat A.Ş., a state-owned satellite communications enterprise (Türkiye Wealth Fund, 2021). The direction of these companies is determined by board members that move between different bureaucratic offices and state-owned enterprises. For instance, the Türksat Board includes senior officials from the Ministry of Health as well as the Office of the Presidency (Türksat, 2021). The transition to the presidential system brought the Fund under the control of the Presidency with the Presidential Decree No. 1 issued on 10 July 2018. The President of the Republic is also the President of the Board of Directors. The Fund is exempt from public auditing by the Court of Accounts. It is audited by private auditors whose reports are submitted to the Parliament. This way of reorganizing the public administration through consolidating the executive powers under offices and policy councils operating directly under the Presidency illustrates what the state transformation approach describes as the adaptation of national politics to the “pressures of transnational market forces” by creating autonomous governance environments, and reducing the number of issues contested through processes of participatory democracy and forms of accountability (Hameiri & Jones, 2015).

The DTO, mandated to coordinate “digital transformation, cyber security, national technologies, big data and artificial intelligence under a single roof in line with advancing technologies, social demands and the reform trends in the public sector” (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2021b), is one of the semi-autonomous, issue-specific bodies created to relocate state power from central government ministries to the hands of experts and managers. The Office is headed by a technocrat with a PhD in electrical engineering and work experience at Intel USA (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2021a). The operation of the DTO is situated in the efficiency argument used to justify the transformation of the country’s political regime into executive presidentialism. Its policy priorities are “predetermined by the President” and its justification for action comes from the requirements envisioned by the presidential system of governance that is defined as “fast, transparent and efficient” (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2021b). The DTO follows private sector practices to coordinate the existing bureaucratic management of e-government and cyber security services. Accordingly, the expected result of the formation of this office is the centralization of data management to facilitate value creation. Yet, the Court of Accounts, the country’s highest auditing agency, has reported that the Office made a loss of 9 million TRY in the 2021 financial year (Court of Auditors, 2022).

The creation of the DTO signifies a shift in the “agential balance of power,” following Schou’s and Hjelholt’s conceptualization of the ability of actors to influence contexts and circumstances (Schou & Hjelholt, 2018: 33). The Office is responsible for the execution of the e-Devlet (e-government) portal, which has been renamed as “Digital Türkiye” as a “first step” towards providing a roadmap for integrated transformation of the online services offered by different public and private agencies (Havelsan, 2019). Upon entrance, the user is introduced to a categorized list of services according to their delegated sectors and links to municipalities, universities, public institutions, and even private firms. While platform is managed by the DTO, Türksat A.Ş. is the agency responsible for system development and operation. The technical infrastructure is effectively the domain of the latter as the national satellite operator which integrates public institutions into Digital Türkiye platform as well as provides services ranging from data coverage, access to broadband internet, TV, and radio broadcasting.

The DTO’s coordination mandate also includes the establishment of a “digital transformation ecosystem” through fostering cooperation among the public sector, private actors, universities and non-governmental agencies as outlined in the 11^th Development Plan (2019–2023) as a key strategy for national wealth creation (Presidency of the Republic of Turkey Presidency of Strategy and Budget, 2019, paragraph 483). Approved by the Turkish Parliament in July 2019, the 11^th Development Plan defines the objective of digital transformation in terms of improving Turkey’s “productivity and competitiveness in priority sectors” (paragraph 343) such as chemical industry, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, electronics, machinery and electrical equipment, automotive, and rail system vehicles. In this regard, the Plan described Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of the critical technology areas for Turkey’s development (paragraph 355), called for roadmaps to produce high-value added goods and services, and proposed the acceleration of the transfer of public services to the electronic environment through modernization projects and process improvements that will contribute to effectiveness and interoperability with a user-oriented perspective and enhanced service delivery through the e-government platform (paragraph 807). As part of these tasks, the DTO has held monthly meetings with deputy ministers involved in the process. These meetings chaired by the country’s Vice-President have sought to harmonize the online services offered by the ministries around a whole-of-government digitalization strategy and reduce the amount of bureaucratic documentation requested from citizens (Havelsan, 2019).

The “Turkish Brain Project” is one of the projects executed by the DTO as part of its mandate of leading and coordinating artificial intelligence (AI) applications in public priority project areas. It has been developed in partnership with the Ankara-based public university Gazi University’s hospital and faculty of engineering to produce artificial intelligence-based detection systems of brain anomalies (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022c). In addition to this project, the Office has initiated the “Open Data Portal” to create “value from anonymized and private data to be offered to individuals and scientific community,” and developed the “Turkish Cyber Security Cluster” in partnership with the Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB) to improve Turkey’s competitiveness in the production of cybersecurity technology through increasing the number of cybersecurity firms in the country, strengthening the financial and administrative capabilities of the cluster member companies, and enhancing their competitive capacity in national and global markets (Türkiye Siber Güvenlik Kümelenmesi, 2022). Yet, the DTO website provides no information as to what the lifetimes and budgets of these projects are, how they are financed, when they will be completed, when the planned end products will start to be used, and how the ownership of the technological systems to be developed will be regulated.

The World Bank describes the COVID-19 pandemic as the trigger of “the largest global economic crisis in more than a century,” with severe economic effects unevenly experienced both within and among nations (World Development Report, 2022). The pandemic led to rising levels of losses of income suffered by households and businesses, as well as of government debt, raising concerns about the debt sustainability capacity of the emerging economies with pre-existing fragilities (World Development Report, 2022). On the other hand, the pandemic witnessed record levels of profits made by Big Tech companies that benefitted from lockdowns and other limitations on people’s activities introduced to prevent the spread of the virus. As of April 2021, the five tech giants—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—generated combined revenue of more than US$ 1.2 trillion (Ovide, 2021).

In light of these constraints and opportunities, the Turkish government has moved on to accelerate the process of digital transformation during the pandemic. The e-government portal has rapidly grown into a one-stop shop for the provision of public services on the basis of the principles of interoperability and “zero documents” (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanlığı Dijital Dönüşüm Ofisi, 2022a). In this regard, the DTO has announced that the average number of documents requested per service went down from 3.80 to 0.34 as a result of the “Digital Türkiye Version 1.1” project the Office has undertaken as part of its mandate of facilitating an integrated transformation of the public administration (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanlığı Dijital Dönüşüm Ofisi, 2022a). The Office has also reported that 45 million Turkish citizens had access to a total of 5170 e-services offered by 641 institutions in January 2019 (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022a). These figures rose to 60 million, 6665 and 886, respectively, as of August 2022 (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022d). Strict control of mobility under lockdown effectively limited the channels for action and interaction to those that were deemed safe and accessible. While the adoption of technologies to the delivery of services has gained strength during the pandemic and is expected to continue to be important in the future, it is nonetheless important to point out that the management of the online interaction between service providers and utilizers goes beyond a simple transaction. It signifies the restructuring of the social life around market relations as a mode of governance that generates different effects on different groups of actors and industries.

As discussed in the conceptual section above, policy models and institutional arrangements introduced by governments are never neutral because the political space where they are negotiated and adopted are always more accessible to certain groups of actors (pursuing their strategies and interests) than to others (Hameiri & Jones, 2015; 2020). The inclusion of certain private actors and interests in the country’s “digital transformation ecosystem” (and the exclusion of others) is a particular case in point for demonstrating the strategic selectivities involved in the digitalization of public services. The pandemic has not only increased the space claimed by the digital government but also expanded the reach of private service providers such as Vodafone, Turkcell, and Turk Telekom in telecommunications (CNN Türk, 2021). These companies have seen popular demand for their applications (launched prior to the pandemic) soar during 2020 and 2021. Applications such as BiP, Yaay, and YaaniMail have been presented and advertised as national alternatives to Whatsapp and Gmail and used in publicized public events and conferences by state departments such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Türk, 2020). Turkcell, after gaining over a million new users during the pandemic, has opened a new data center in 2021 (NTV, 2021). Company executives include themselves in the collective outlook behind DTO initiatives by appropriating, if not taking credit for, the slogan: “keep Turkey’s data in Turkey.” This appropriation could also reflect the company’s inclusion in the sovereign wealth fund, directed by the President and his affiliates. On the other hand, public and private attitudes toward digital media outlets should be considered in connection with recent trends in the traditional media sector and their effects on consumer attitudes in Turkey. The current media landscape is shaped by select monopolies under conglomerates, such as Demirören Holding and Doğuş Holding, which acquire prominent companies under various sectors, including but not limited to, construction, energy, mining, and news media (Yildiz, 2019). Some of these recent media acquisitions have been aided by loans provided by banks included under the sovereign wealth fund and its board of directors (Ocak, 2021).

It appears that the government aspires to take advantage of the expansion of the digitalization of public services and business activities during the pandemic. In 2021, the e-commerce sales volume recorded an annual growth of 69%, and rose to 381,5 billion TRY (Ministry of Trade, 2022). The government’s strategic approach to the creation of value from data is nested in a politics of culture that has revolved around the use of the “native and national” narrative. As discussed in the previous section, the shift towards neoliberal regulatory statehood goes beyond the physical transformation of the state apparatus. It involves not only the reallocation of authority and functions of the state into insulated spaces of decision-making where market-led development agendas are advanced, but also shifts in the normative objectives of state power. This is reflected in the rise of a discourse of values that has become the main point of reference for political participation. The concepts of native and national that President Erdoğan has frequently used to distinguish the AKP from other parties in the period following the adoption of an executive presidential regime highlight this trend. By categorizing other parties as representing “non-native” and “non-national” values and identities, this political language has served to delineate the boundaries of what issues and interests are allowed for representation in the Turkish political landscape where authoritative decisions are negotiated and made. More specifically, the definition of who gets what on the basis of values, which denies the existence of class-based divides, has served to marginalize political claims based rising economic inequalities in society.

The emphasis on native and national has become central to the discourses of governance selected by the DTO President in relation to the transformation of the Turkish public sector. Digitalization policies and practices are presented as efforts to increase the “global competitiveness” of Turkey and “make our domestic and national technologies indispensable across the world by promoting innovative approaches.” These tasks are premised on a normative framework that emphasizes the integration of “our unique values” into the digitalization process (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022e) and introduction of a “domestic and national approach” to generate a data-driven economy (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Digital Transformation Office, 2022b):

We should have the same understanding towards each byte of data just like every inch of the soil of our country which have a value at the cost of our lives. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that each byte of our data is kept within our borders and well protected.

This normative framework defined as the “national technology move” is shaped by a criticism of the monopolization in scientific and technological developments at the global level (DTO & MoIT, 2021). The DTO President, for instance, has announced that the phrase “the world is bigger than GAFAM [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft] ¹ informs the DTO’s approach towards the creation of incentives for the development of national alternatives to imported technologies. In this context, the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, jointly released in August 2021 by the DTO and the Ministry of Industry and Technology upon extensive review of related public documents and a total of 206 interviews with public institutions (36), private sector organizations (38), NGOs (3), universities (26), and domain experts in different disciplines (103), outlines six strategic priorities in the creation of value from data at institutional and sectoral levels. These priorities, defined in the context of the governance of a “radical transformation in the socio-economic structure” AI and other critical technologies have triggered, include 1) training of experts and increasing employment in these areas; 2) supporting research, entrepreneurship, and innovation in these fields; 3) improving access to quality data and technical infrastructure; 4) regulating to accelerate socio-economic adjustments; 5) strengthening international cooperation; and 6) accelerating structural and workforce transformation (DTO & MoIT, 2021). These strategies, selected to improve Turkey’s global competitiveness through strengthening its domestic invention and production capacity, highlight how the purpose of the use of state power is framed in culturalist terms to rationalize the broader neoliberal state transformation context within which the current process of digital transformation is developing. After all, as suggested by the DTO President, it is now public data that has become a key asset in generating economic value:

[Digital transformation is about] turning public data into diamond. Data concerning an item you purchase from your corner shop may not be of importance to you. However, when data about [consumption habits of] all other people is gathered, it gains a very different dimension such as whether a new shop will be opened somewhere on that street or there will be need for advertisement activity or not. When cumulative community-wide data, not individual data, is gathered, it turns into value.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have used the state transformation approach to examine the socio-political context within which the digital transformation of the Turkish public sector has been operationalized during the pandemic. This process of the digitalization of public services, in other words, is part of the Turkish state’s ongoing transformation into the regulatory state form that encompasses shifts in the location of state power, in the actors exercising it, and in the norms and ideas employed to rationalize its exercise.

The creation of the DTO, which operates as a semi-autonomous agency under the Presidency, reflects the neoliberal practice of shifting the governance of key issues to regulatory spaces where non-accountable actors exercise political power and authority. This institutional arrangement is associated with a political logic that privileges expert-led forms of governance as the foundation of domestic political stability and sustained economic growth ensured through a commitment to effectively functioning global liberal markets. The native and national narrative which has been used to define the operation of the Office as a coordinating agency to strengthen Turkey’s global competitiveness is a manifestation of the politics of values that denies the legitimacy of interest-based political representation.

Author Biography

Selver B. Sahin is an assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. She is the author of International Intervention and State-Making: How the Exception Became the Norm (Routledge, 2015). Her research is focused on the socio-political foundations of institutional and governmental outcomes and has been published in Democratization, Development Policy Review, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Contemporary Politics, Asian Studies Review, Australian Journal of International Affairs, and International Peacekeeping.

ORCID iD

Selver B. Sahin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9837-2640