Integrating Strategic Planning into Turkish Public Administration: An Actor-Centered Account of Policy Transfer

This study examines the transfer process of strategic planning as a public administration policy in Türkiye from the perspectives of Translation Theory and Institutional Logics, based on the viewpoints of the actors who were the architects of the reform. The data of the research consists of interviews conducted through narrative inquiry with upper and middle-level public managers who assumed various roles during the transfer of strategic planning. The findings indicate that strategic planning underwent a radical change while entering its new context; however, this change was a reactive process shaped by external pressures and a sense of urgency, rather than a conscious translation strategy. The combination of pressures from international actors such as the World Bank, IMF, and the European Union, the bureaucracy’s desire for change, the need to resolve financial crises, and the new government’s search for legitimacy led to acting with a sense of urgency, thereby preventing the necessary adaptations. Furthermore, with the effect of gaining legal ground within the Public Financial Management and Control Law No. 5018, strategic planning transformed into a financial management and control tool under the control of the dominant statist logic, rather than a performance-oriented approach. According to the actors' perspectives, the tension between the hierarchical and statist logic of Turkish public administration and the market and performance logic of strategic planning was not evaluated as a significant problem. This contextual difference was approached with optimism that it could be overcome over time, and the necessary radical adaptations were bypassed. This situation prevented the achievement of the targeted successful results. Based on this, the study adopts a cautious approach against the assumption of New Institutional Theory, which defends the universal validity of management tools like strategic planning, and argues, as pointed out by Scandinavian Institutionalism (SI), that every transfer is actually a process of ‘translation’ and ‘differentiation’ reproduced in the local context. In this direction, it is concluded that reform success depends on a conscious and ‘context-sensitive translation strategy’ established by actors between local institutional logics and global models, rather than the universal technical superiority of the tool. Thus, the study provides an original contribution to the literature by empirically demonstrating how deeply rooted statist logics in non-Western contexts transform global management tools during the transfer process and by critiquing the universal recipe assumption prevalent in policy transfer and translation theory.