Şeyda UzunEge UniversitiyBialystok,2010

•City Council•Women Activities•Youth Activities•Working Groups•Democratization Process

Agenda 21

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive global action plan for socially, economically and environmentally sustainable development in the 21st century.

It was approved by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro,1992.

Agenda 21

It constitutes an unique commitment by the international community to an integrated framework of shared values, goals, actions and precedence. Agenda 21 also recognized as the most important output of the Rio Conference.

It reflects the emerging global consensus over two decades on the concept of sustainability introduced by the 1972 Stockholm Conference, interlocking environment and development, as well as introducing a new understanding of human-centered sustainable development.

Local Agenda 21

This is an enormous task for local authorities which have both global and local implications, because they are provided with the mandate of translating the global concerns of Agenda 21 to concrete action at the local level.

Local Agenda 21On the one hand, local authorities are compelled to deal

with virtually all topics and perform at varying degrees all respective tasks delineated in Agenda 21, thereby doing no less than embarking on the path to sustainable development at the local level, and justifying Agenda 21 at the international level.

On the other hand, the mandate of promoting participatory and decentralized mechanisms for decision-making, community empowerment, and developing partnerships with local actors call for local authorities not only to act for themselves as one of the nine major groups identified in Agenda 21, but also for all the others.

KeysConsensusParticipatoryFollows the Rule of LawEffective,EfficientAccountableTransparentEquitable and Inclusive

City Council

Article 76 is concluded by asserting that the framework for the operation and functioning of the City Council would be determined by the By-laws to be prepared by the Ministry of Interior.

The By-laws of the City Council, whose draft was prepared with the contributions of project partners, came into effect via being published in the Official Gazette of Turkey on 8 October 2006.

Women Council

Women council can be seen the national representation structure by looking at insufficient representation of women in City Councils and similar platforms. The number of women that can participate as “natural members” from amongst the Parliamentarians, the Governor and elected local authorities of the respective provinces, is drastically low in such platforms.

On the other hand, women can participate in such platforms as members of municipalities’ councils or members of non-governmental organizations, working groups and women’s councils.

Objectives Women Council

Being gender sensitivity of Capacity development in natural resource management of economic and social development.

Increasing women’s participation into sustainable agriculture in every condition and level.

Gender sensitivity and equal access of women in health; eradicating gender inequality in primary and secondary education until 2005.

Recognizing the essential role of women in bio-diversity. Integrating gender sensitivity into Agenda 21 practices for

sustainable development in official structure.

Youth CouncilDefinition: “an institution established on the basis of

voluntarism that seeks, within the framework of the multi-partner and multi-actor governance approach,

the strengthening of horizontal relations between partners in local decision making processes,

the strengthening of democratic participation and structures,

the enablement of the youth in sustainable development, augmenting their active role in the management of cities

and the improvement of living conditions.

Youth Council to embrace its institutional and individual members under a joint umbrella.

Constituents of the Youth Council  The representatives of associations and foundations, as

well as civil initiatives conducting activities geared toward the youth in the target age group;

Representatives of Student Councils of Universities;Representatives of Student Councils of Secondary Schools;Representatives of youth clubs, student clubs, and student

boards in schools;Representatives of unorganized youth (representatives of

the working, unemployed, disabled, etc. youth identified via Working Groups and/or from Neighborhoods);

(The youth branches of political parties are envisaged to be represented in the Civil Youth Council only subsequent to the completion of its establishment.)

Working Groups

It is not practical or suitable for the City Council, encompassing the local partners coming together on the basis of “institutional representation”, to carry out meticulous activities on different topics.

Participants from different sectors, institutions and disciplines are coming together to work profoundly on priority topics corresponding to the components of local action planning for sustainable development with the Working Groups established in this context.

Working GroupsCitizens take part in working groups due to their interests and

voluntariness principle. After the citizens make their applications, the groups complete their formations by choosing their presidents among themselves. Each group holds the meetings once a week at the hour they determine among themselves. The groups which try to strengthen the civil initiative say “Come and you take on responsibility too.” in order to make the governance active. By this way they implement a project or understand why it cannot be implemented instead of being always demanding and complaining.

On the other hand they try to provide the interaction between groups by representatives of the groups attending the meetings of other groups. For example, we can see the presidents of Environment and Forest Working Group at the meeting of Culture and Arts Working Group. They give place to projects about Arts-Sports and Environment-Recycling. And their participants are represented in a way that there are volunteers from every occupation group.

My researchesThere are 8 working groups in Bornova

Municipality City Council. Education Working Group Sports and Health Working Group Environment and Forest Working Group Agriculture and Food Working Group Culture and Arts Working Group Senior Citizens and the Disabled Working

Group Tourism and Introduction Working Group Disaster and Crisis Working Group

My researchesBursa Nilüfer Municipality City Council is the best example for

this. Waste Battery Collection Project, 500 Children Hand In Hand Peace School Project, Nilüfer Environment Situation Report, Bright and Secure Nilüfer Project, Green Nilüfer Week, Misi Protection and Sustentation Project, Milk Distribution Project are the projects which are implemented by Nilüfer City

Council. Besides, they support social life with festivals and bicycle tours. They arrange a web site of them professionally and provide the tracing of the site by announcing their activities up-to-date. By this way governance is provided effectively and sense of belonging is formed in the society.

Democratization Process of Turkey If we analyze the changes that City Councils bring to the

governance of the cities in this context; it is clear that the efforts to internalizing the democracy and embracing it will be included in this progress.

First of all, the main of this progress is to enable the contribution of larger group of people to the governance process.

In this way it will be possible to get rid of contradictions caused by “governing – governed” paradox and all sides who will meet at the base of “Collective Intelligence” , will be responsible for the decisions they take. This will ease the progress of “Sustainable Development”.

Also making non-governmental organization representatives part of the governance process will strengthen the principle of transparency.

Democratization Process of Turkey Localization can be defined as increasing effect of local

dynamics on governance compared to the effect of the center. Increasing effect of the local dynamics enables democratical contribution.

Another impact of this progress is to provide local dynamics have an active duty at the progress of development of the City.

Non-Governmental Organizations and Universities and other working groups prepare reports and action plans. The main point at here is to place an institulionalizing civil society mechanism in a governance process in a healthy way. At this point we have to emphasize that efficient and effective work can be made sustainable with a cooperation with Central Structures.

Populism and anti-democratic behaviours of local authorities can be prevented in coordination with Central Government.

Democratization Process of Turkey Conclusion;City Councils are important tools for beginning and

applicability of such processes and they had to continue their developments.

Our country has been claiming the ideal and aim of “Democratization” from the first day that it has been founded. If we analyze the some non-democratical applications at our country’s history, our country can be seen as hanging back at other democratical countries; however it is safe to say that there is a strong acceleration about democracy,especially for the last 20 years.

The sustainability of democratic advantages are strictly related with the widespread situation of it . If we analyze the developed countries, we can prove the idea that we can increase our country’s welfare as long as we can protect the advantages of democracy.

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