The rise and fall of community development in rural Turkey, 1960-1980

Abstract

Turkey's Community Development Program (CDP), implemented in the 1960s and 1970s, has remained a largely underexplored subject in the global history of rural community development schemes. Based on detailed archival research, this article shows that the programme's central goal was to mobilize the labour and financial resources of the villagers to carry out rapid infrastructure construction. Turkish policymakers hoped that such mobilization could help achieve a high level of rural development far beyond what could be achieved by relying solely on government spending and might also allow the allocation of more resources to urban industrialization. Despite its initial promise, the CDP was unable to effectively mobilize the countryside due to a combination of structural, political, and bureaucratic challenges, including unequal land distribution, intense electoral competition, and inadequate administrative coordination. However, the CDP was not entirely inconsequential. It played a modest role in the commercialization and capitalist transformation of Turkish agriculture.