Resilience in Local Governance - Türkiye

In partnership with the Union of Municipalities of Türkiye, Marmara Municipalities Union and Çukurova Municipalities Union, and more than 30 municipalities across Türkiye, Reslog Türkiye worked between 2018 and 2025 to improve community resilience towards multi-layered shocks.

The project worked with municipality associations and municipalities to make Syrian refugee and local communities more resilient through more effective local governance, peaceful co-habitation, equal access to inclusive services and improvement of livelihood opportunities.

Through a unique combination of high level expertise, innovative methods, cutting edge research, multi-level policy dialogue, knowledge generation processes, capacity development, and conflict & gender sensitive local actions in fields such as social services, urban development, migration management, community inclusion, environmental protection, and livelihood development, Reslog has been a pioneer in the field of local governance and migration in Türkiye.

Three levels of impact

Reslog Türkiye worked on three different levels to affect systems change, including:

1. Supporting national migration policies to better reflect local realities and needs
2. Enhancing regional capacity, cooperation and coordination on migration issues
3. Improving municipality planning and service delivery through inclusive local actions to enhance community resilience and active citizenship.

Fostering Peaceful Cohabitation

Peaceful cohabitation was a central objective to the project. In order to develop institutional capacities to respond to migration-related issues, Reslog supported enabling environments for stronger civic engagement and assisted municipalities to make services more responsive to actual local needs. Enabling environments for peaceful co-habitation was created through fostering active citizenship and structured interactions between municipalities and communities through networking, joint actions and awareness raising activities.

Ehancing Livelihood Opportunities

Another component of Reslog Türkiye was to provide more decent and greener livelihood opportunities for local communities and refugees. In collaboration with civil society organizations and with a special focus on women, the project enabled local governments to take on the role as catalyst for greener and more inclusive local economic development. This was achieved through a variety of capacity development approaches, testing of local innovative models linked to green transition centers and circular economy practices, and by developing capacity building programmes and guidebooks for municipalities.

Enhanced Resilience and Recovery Planning

The project supported partner municipalities to develop hands-on practical skills in inclusive municipal migration management practices. Introduced tools were Migration Master Plans (MMP) and resilience assessments, operationalized through municipal strategic plans, and earthquake City Reports developed by municipalities affected by the 2023 earthquakes. The MMP is a planning tool, and introduced migration management as an integral part of the strategic plans of municipalities. It is designed to be gender conscious and inclusive which enabled the municipalities to plan, design and test various social services. It has continuously been adapted per the local contexts and at the end of the project there were many best practices of tested services from the MMPs, demonstrating enhanced migration management capacity among the partner municipalities.

Supporting Migration Policies

In order to support migration policies to better reflect local realities and needs, Reslog Türkiye brought local government perspectives on migration matters to the regional and national level. The project's position as an independent, impartial and fact-based arena for policy dialogue was a strong asset. By supporting local to local (horizontal) and local to central (vertical) government dialogue and knowledge sharing in parallel, migration related governance capacities was strengthened at a systems level.

Reslog reports and publications

Reslog Türkiye Youtube channel

Marléne Hugosson
Project Manager, Türkiye
marlene.hugosson@skr.se