Shifting responsibility in governing aging: municipal active aging discourses in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article investigates active aging as a tool of governing the aging population at the municipal level. Using Foucault’s framework of governmentality, it explores the techniques of governing aging via the construction of the desirable older subjectivity, reflecting upon the role of the family in caregiving. Conducting in-depth interviews with municipal officials in charge of aging programs, we illustrated that, despite regional differences in socio-economic development levels connected to urban/modernized and rural/traditional cultural frames, all municipalities in our study embrace active aging in which older people are responsibilized for leading an active life to avoid being a burden on the family. We argue that neoliberal active aging discourses are mobilized to substitute the decreasing welfare function of conservative familialism in Turkey and the individualistic self-technologies are instrumentalized for familialist conducts. This reveals that the coexistence of multiple rationalities in the governing process can unsettle habitual consistencies between problematizations, conducts and self-technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Active aging
• desirable older subjectivity
• municipal policies
• governmentality
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Several elected mayors from the HDP (People’s Democratic Party) in Eastern Anatolia have been replaced by trustees (kayyum) by the government. Moreover, YADES beneficiaries are generally AKP municipalities (The Ministry of Family and Social Services Website 2022) thus equal access to state resources may be limited for municipalities. For instance, Eskişehir (CHP) municipality mentioned that their applications for YADES program were rejected several times.

2. Active aging is often studied quantitatively in Turkey from a normative perspective. (Çuhadar 2020; Karabulut 2022)

3. The data were collected for a Ph.D. thesis (Yazar 2022).

4. In Turkish, ikinci bahar means living a youthful life after middle age.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tahire Erman

Tahire Erman received her Ph.D. from the City University of New York. She is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University, Ankara. Her research interests intersect migration/mobility; gender and urban issues. She published book chapters, along with journal articles in Gender, Place and Culture; Gender & Society; Women's Studies International Forum; City & Culture, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Urban Studies; Housing Studies; Environment and Planning A; Environment and Behavior; Habitat International; Urban Anthropology; Middle Eastern Studies. She was a visiting scholar at the Center for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA) (February 2018-January 2019); at the Program of Human Geography, Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam (UvA) (January 2019-January 2020); and the Department of Social Anthropology and Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University (September 2005-May 2006). She received Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant for the academic year 2005-2006, appointed jointly by the Anthropology Department and Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. She received the ‘Donald Robertson Memorial Prize’ for the best article published in Urban Studies in 2001.

Damla Yazar

Damla Yazar is a PhD Candidate at Bilkent University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration. Her research interests intersect aging studies and rural development. She graduated from Social Policy Master Program at Middle East Technical University. She worked as a planning specialist at the Ministry of Development and prepared her research thesis on the regional dynamics of aging.